The painter's oval, cut from clear acrylic sheet rather than moulded in plastic or wood. It is one flat piece with a thumb hole and the scooped waist that lets it sit against your forearm, and it has no wells at all — the whole face is mixing surface.

Clear is a working choice, not a styling one. Lay the palette over the paper, canvas or board you are about to paint and you can mix a colour directly against the ground it has to sit on. A tone that looks right on a white tray can go dead against a toned canvas or a cream sheet, and this is the palette that shows you before the brush lands. Slide a sheet of white paper underneath instead and it behaves like a white palette again — the choice stays yours from one minute to the next.

The flat face is what makes it a mixing tool rather than a paint holder. Wells are for wet colour that has to stay separate — watercolour and poster colour, which is what our Sakura folding palette with its two rows of wells is built for. A flat board suits paint you are working with a knife or a stiff brush: acrylic and oil, where a colour is dragged out, adjusted, and taken up again.

Cleaning is where acrylic sheet earns its place. There is nothing for paint to sit in — a wipe with a rag takes wet paint off, and dried acrylic peels away from the smooth face in a sheet rather than staining into moulded corners. A wooden palette has to be seasoned with oil before it stops drinking your paint, and a white plastic one holds a ghost of every strong colour it has ever mixed.

Two sizes are stocked: Rs. 450 for the small and Rs. 575 for the large. Choose the small for detail work, a travel bag, or a table already crowded with a water pot and a paint box; choose the large if you mix several colours at once or work on anything bigger than A3. Tell us which one on WhatsApp when you order.

One thing about the photographs: the paint blobs and brushes shown on the palette are there to show it in use. What ships is the palette on its own.

Why this product is worth considering