Colour Chickens - Best Exercise to swatch watercolours

1. Intro: Well, I'm not sure if it's the best watercolor exercise ever, but it's certainly a very useful one and a lot of fun to do. If you do it consistently, you will not only get better at mixing your colors and understanding your pigments, but also train your brush control. I've got this exercise from an artist called David Millard. Who left us this wonderful book, the Joy watercolor, and it's called the color chickens. Instead of painting boring grids to swatch your colors, those little chickens are way more fun to do, and we'll also use a little bit of our dexterity along the way. So let me show you how it's done. 2. The Colour Chickens Exercise: I recently put this new pigment from whole mine. This is the perfect opportunity to swatch some colors. Put a good fat dollop up there. For my brush, I'm going to use my golden maple sable brush. I've mixed quite a creamy consistency here. I want to get enough pigment when I do colors watching. It's got to be quite strong and intense, and I'm going to start with the head and a little big. Just like that. I'm going to paint these first couple of chickens a little bit bigger than I usually would for colors watching just so you can see it a bit better. I'm using Quincos for my second color. And I'm starting at the tail so that I've got some pure pigment to go around the bottom and then I'll mix it into my first color. And depending on the combination of colors, you may have to go in with a bit more of the first color just to make sure that we have a nice blended area because that's what we're trying to find out how do the two colors mix together? For the second one, I'm going to start off again with yellow, making sure my pigment is nice and creamy and my brush is nicely loaded and then start with the neck. Then pop on a little head. This one, I'm going to mix it with ultran blue, just to see what green I'm going to get. Start with the tail, come around the bottom, and then mix it in with the first color. That didn't quite match up. No problems, add a bit more yellow, and the legs. In essence, all there is two painting color chickens. But if you want to get real fancy, you can add a third color. I'm going to add a tiny bit of apnium red light just to make the chickens look a bit more like chickens. Here's a time lapse of what it looks like when I do the actual color swatching with those little chickens. I'm using my yellow and just mixing it with every color that I generally use in my palette just to see what kind of mixes I can get and then write down the pigments. Not only can I see the colors it's mixing, but also how the two pigments interact with each other. I'm loving that indigo there at the bottom and a neutral tint. And there we go. That's my color chart for my dazzling yellow by whole bine. 3. Project: For your project, I obviously like you to now swatch some colors using those wonderful, little colorful chickens. You can obviously use any paper you like, scrap paper. That's what I often do. Or if you have it, a dedicated little color reference book where I keep track of my color mixes. Start with one color and then combine it with as many colors as you like. I usually just swatch my entire palette like that. I'd also like it to share your favorite or your most surprising color combinations. One of the great things about swatching this way is you don't just see the color mixes, but also how certain pigments react with each other. Here, you can see that the alo green and the cat red light don't really blend all that smoothly. There's a really strong separation here. It's actually quite a fascinating effect, and something I might use or explore in another painting. Here the serian sepia Max is beautiful warm gray, but look at the granulation of how those two pigments interact with each other. Please have fun with this, and I look forward to seeing your wonderful color combinations. Thanks for watching.