Search for paint pots made of plastic on the Internet and the first thing you’ll find is what the major search engines are now calling “shopping results”. One of which lists eight (that’s eight) plastic paint pots for 99p. 99p! I can’t remember when anything cost 99p, let alone eight of something. It’s pretty much impossible to get a chocolate bar for 99p these days – and here are the manufacturers of paint pots, churning out good, solid dependable kit for 99p! Try and buy eight chocolate bars for 99p and see how far you have to go before you can’t hear the shopkeeper laughing his or her head off any more.
They’re extremely useful, too, these paint pots. Plastic, as well as being extraordinarily resilient, is really easy to clean. And that means clear colours, no matter what. Any artist will tell you that muddied colours (which tend to be the result of dirty pots) can ruin a whole picture. Using plastic paint pots means the receptacles can be thoroughly cleaned at the end of every session, with very little chance that whatever was in them will remain to taint the materials of a new picture. Even oils and acrylics can be used safely in plastic – white spirit, which removes oil paint, has very little immediate effect on plastic. It is, after all, supplied in plastic gallon tubs. Clean pots with it – use the pots, full of spirit, to clean brushes. Once dry, they’ll be as good as new.
As with anything brilliant, plastic paint pots can be adapted for a number of tasks, all with equal success. Aside from their overall benefits to the practising artist, whose need for affordable equipment is pretty much compounded to the nth degree by the ludicrous price of everything else he or she has to use, the plastic paint pot performs a vital function in the children’s art room. Creativity is a natural urge, and children can become rather over enthusiastic with it – supply them with a set of non-spill paint pots (plastic paint pots with screw on lids, that let a brush in but no paint out) and they can express as hard as they like, without fear of damaging anything important.