Palettes and colour charts with a difference

Colour Chart Coasters

A lot of artists I know are very fond of collecting trivia which is artist related - and this is a post for those who have a tendency to buy art tools on items wholly unrelated to the studio.

Those clever people at the National Portrait Gallery shop have been exploiting this tendency of late with a fantastic range of goods based around a colour chart and a palette.

In this post, you can see the two items I bought this summer  - and am very happy with. However I can't identify them in the shop and am wondering if either they are now only available in the shop - or they've sold out!

Artist's Palette fridge magnet

For the record: the colour chart coasters were £14.50 and the artist's palette fridge magnet was £3.50.  They're suitably practical to justify the price while being a great deal more attractive and appealing to me than alternatives fulfilling the same function.

The palette is actually based on George Johann Scharf's small china palette and is 19 x 15cm. Scharf was a German artist who chronicled 19th century London - which you can read about in this blog post.

There's also a small Small China Palette brooch of the same design available from the website.

Plus links to more of the same in terms of the colour chart design - but different online.  I'm very taken with the Colour Chart tea towel.

I do like the National Portrait Gallery shop - and I highly recommend it for a browse if you're in this area of London with a few minutes to spare.  They have a habit of coming up with items which are slightly quirky and better quality than one might find elsewhere. Some are somewhat highly priced but if you pick and choose you can have a small indulgence for not very much at all!