Moving watercolors from half-pans into a Pocket palette

I just received my Art Toolkit palettes order today, and made a seemingly successful attempt to load them with paints from half-pans. (My original palette was an “Urban Sketchers” a.k.a. “Urban Sketching” 12-color palette from the Polish Aquarius/Roman Szmal brand.)

I would say, based on my attempt, that working with dry paint when moving them is less messy and less lossy than with wet. Also each half-pan had different consistency naturally, I assume possibly due to different chemical composition, so some were hard, many were soft. In case of the hard ones, it was time-consuming and required patience to cut out parts of them and move into the new containers, but there was less of the paint lost, and less mess and dirtyness everywhere around. I’m super happy I bought a small metal “palette knife” (or spatula?) for this, the smallest I found in my local internet artists shop — I found it super helpful, the blade made of thin but strong and elastic metal, which is at the same time not sharp enough to cut myself easily.

I’m sincerely thoroughly impressed and surprised how much paint fits in those seemingly tiny containers; they made a significantly bigger dent in my half-pans than all the sketches I made till now taken together… I mean, I’m an amateur, and not a particularly prolific artist, but I feel I definitely don’t need to worry this palette is “too small” for me. And it’s only the Pocket one - I also bought the Folio, but not even trying to fill it at the moment; I assume it’d completely consume everything I have left in the half-pans, and still have free space. At the time of writing, I haven’t tested it in the field yet; the one thing I’m somewhat concerned about at the moment is that it doesn’t have too much space for mixing paints. I wonder if I should somehow procure some extra piece of plastic (?) for more mixing space.

I was happy to confirm that the Pocket palette fits perfectly into a Traveler’s Notebook Passport size “004 Zipper Case” insert. I was even more happy to when I found a way to also fit a brush pen into this pocket setup. I’ve done it with a Sakura Koi Water Brush Large (#8). This brush splits into two parts, one of them is a closeable water container body/handle, the other is a screw-on brush tip. The water container part amazingly is able to fit into the Zipper Case along with the Art Toolkit pocket palette. The other half, with the brush tip, is now attached to the notebook through a Leuchtturm Pen Loop. Some other accessories visible in the photos are an Ohto Minimo mechanical pencil, and a 32mm Medium size binder clip from the Tools To Liveby brand.

The back pocket also contains a small plastic bag intended for use as an emergency protection from rain.

For the time being, I intend to try using this set without a cover. I bought a rather pretty one from Etsy, but I found that it’s surprisingly large. It increases the bulk and height of the set enough, that I don’t currently find it comfortable for carrying in a back pocket. Whereas the coverless version seems doable. Time will tell whether it’s going to work in practice for me at all.