Ok, I will second most everything said here, as its basically good advice. I would offer a dissenting voice on homemade wet pallettes. While it is cheaper to produce a homemade pallettes, I still recommend the Masterson Stay-wet pallette and its specialized paper. My experience is that the parchment paper in a homemade pallette gets a little too wet and over thins my paints. It's also very good for a single session, but does not endure well to spending a few days in water. The Masterson pallette paper is a little more fiddly, but the paper is easily cleanable, has a very nice level of permeability, and a single sheet usually lasts me a month or so. Given that 30 sheets of paper are @5 bucks, it's not that expensive.
I'm not knocking homemade wet pallettes, just saying there is a reason to get the commercially produced ones.
Whatever you do, don't get the p3 pallette. It's twenty bucks, has a crap sponge and is not even watertight.