In this class, you will learn to swatch your watercolor paints in order to get to know them and their properties, in a fun and playful way. I will also teach you to make a beautiful swatch page for a color palette.

A good way to understand your watercolor paints is to swatch them, meaning making a little card with the color painted on it so you can really see its hue as a paint, not only what is printed on the tube or pan.

That is the simplest form of swatching: the paint chip. But things can get much more interesting.

Watercolor paint properties

Watercolor paints have many properties that differ from one color to the next, depending on the pigments used and what the paint is made of, for example:

the range of the hue,
transparency vs opacity,
staining properties,
the ability to layer the color,
the possiblity to lift the color,
how it behaves in water.

I will teach you what these properties mean throughout this class.

Why learn about paint properties and swatch my colors?

If you want to explore all of your paints’ potential, color swatches can be done in a way to document all these properties.

But technical swatching of watercolors can become tedious. And I want to show you how to approach these swatches in a playful manner.

The color swatches we will paint together

In this class, we will try many example of color swatches so you can find your favorites:

The simple “paintchip” swatch
The technical swatch
The color chart
The palette mixing swatch
The chaotic and playful swatch
The wavy pattern

In this class, I will show you that there is some space for playing and creativity while learning about your colors.

You will learn different ways to swatch your colors AND have fun AND create little pieces of art along the way.

Oh! And in case you are a fellow color nerd like me, we will cover the technical swatch in one lesson, because it can be a nice reference to have in your toolkit. But if you don’t feel like exploring this, please skip the lesson.

The project

The project from this class will be a lovely reference page of swatches for a color palette of your choosing. Like in the example below.

These are a beautiful way to document color palette, play with them and find all the colors you can make while mixing your chosen colors.

Denise Orensteen

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