Expanding Watercolor Travel Kits

1. Expanded Watercolor Travel Kits: Hi, I'm Chris Carter. In one of my Skillshare classes, I've shown you how to make a travel kit, a mini Altoid, ten watercolor travel path that looks like a mini Alto written inside this one is a full pan and three-half pounds of paint. And what I've done is I've gone several steps further to make it much easier for me to grab and go to grab one of my tins, to know what's in it and to know what I can do with what's in it still. Everything that's in a little tiny snack pack. Or it can actually fit in to a Ziploc bag. That's half the size. I want to show you what's in this little kit and then I'll show you how to make those things. The reason I did this is because after so many years of teaching, I have quite a collection of little tins, little tens, big tins, medium-sized tens. I have a lot of half pans and full pans of watercolor of all different kinds. Some which aren't labeled two, don't really know what they are. And what I've done is I've spread them all out. And I have filled my tins with all of those patterns. Usually putting at least one of each primary and to each ten. And then what I did was I made a little card with watercolor that duplicated the position of the pans in the tin. And then I took a sample watercolor brush and painted those in so that I could see exactly what they were. If I know what they are. I label not only the color but the manufacturer on this little piece. And then I put contact paper on both sides. One side, clip it around, the other side, wrap it around so this is waterproof. And that sits nicely in here. Of course I take it out when I'm painting because I'm using this to mix my paints. Then I make a sample swatch of each color. I labeled the color and the manufacturer again, as well as the pigment, if I know what it is. And here the lower one, I put a solid as dark as I can and still have it a watercolor where it's not opaque. Have that in the smaller one. And in this larger one, I go from the palest, pale icon of that pigment down to the darker pigment. So this gives me a lot of information about this palette, but I go one step further. If it's just either three primaries or four or five or six primaries, one warm, one cool. I might though, I don't always make a little color wheel so that I can see what my secondaries and my tertiary colors are with these and these pigments alone. Now in this case, I do have an ivory black in here, which I haven't used black for, I don't know, 152025 years, except to make a green with yellow sometimes. But I had a whole lot of these half pans because they taught a workshop one time, just dealing with grayscale. So I'm using them up and I find that they make some really great, beautiful hues mixed in with some of my other colors. So I have that. And then what I do is I take each color and I mix it with every other color in every possible combination using just these. I do that in a sketchbook. Cape is a record that has watercolor paper and it's, that works out well. I photograph that and it won't be perfect match of color, but I photograph it. And I printed out on a piece of paper that allows me to fold it in half and put all of this information into this Ziploc bag to keep it dry. Then I, I can take it out and see exactly an idea of the kinds of colors I can make with the palette I picked. And I put it in, in such a way that without even opening this up, I get an idea of the kinds of colors that I can make. So if I'm going to go out, I can look. I've got about 12 of these. And then some are a little bit bigger, like this size ten. And some are bigger, some have more paints. And I can look at the backs and say, Today, I feel like this kind of a color day or depending on whether I want to be realistic or not, if it's kind of a gray day, I might I might not take this one. I might take this one. So I don't have to fumble through all these tents, opening them up to see what they are visually, I can see right away. And when I go outside, I can see the numerous combinations that I can make with those. So that's what this class is about. It's, it's the extended travel watercolor kit. Without it being any bigger. It can still fit in your pocket. I'm Chris Carter. I hope you enjoy the class. 2. Materials: In this video, I'll be going over the materials you need to make your own reference sheets to tuck into your Ziploc bag or your cloth bag, whatever it is that you use to carry your travel tin around. The first thing you need is your tin of pigments. I have a ten with three pigments. Attend with four pigments. A ten with five pigments. The micro portable painter palette with six pigments, and a business card palette with seven pigments. I'm gonna be walking you through the layout for the charting of these different variations. Three, pigment for pigment to pigment, six pigment and seven pigment. Then you're going to need brushes. You can use just three brushes. A flat, a small flat around. And I use a stiff kids brush for cleaning out my palette. You'll need a pencil. You'll need permanent marker, either a permanent fine tip marker or a fountain pen filled with permanent ink. Make sure that you do not put India ink into a fountain pen. It will destroy your fountain pen because India ink has shellac in it. So what you wanna do is use either platinum and carbon ink or I use sometimes nude colors, black, bulletproof black. You're going to need templates, either templates that you've purchased or templates that you make yourself. The main templates that I use, these for the color charting is this one. And this one. I also find a circle template, very handy. You can draw your own templates freehand if you wish. You can also cut your own templates. This is a template that I made for little thumbnails and I just took a file folder. I drew out the squares. In this case, you would be drawing out the color charting rows. And then I used an exacto knife and a metal edge to cut out the squares. I flip it over the page and I trace. Then you'll need a mixing palette. There are a number of mixing palettes that I find pretty useful. All of these are good. I like to have a lot of little compartments so that I don't have to wash this between each mix. I have to keep my colors clean, absolutely clean. So I will put the two pigments I'm mixing in separate holes and then I'll mix over here, and then the next two I'll put here, then the next two here. So I keep it very, very clean. And then I when I filled all of these up, I take it to the sink and Washington. So those are three that I find useful. This also is useful because there's lots of little compartments and I can mix in here. And this one is also very useful. Again, lots of little compartments mixing, mixing. And I do like this because actually when I travel, I bring this so that I have a lot of extra mixing room. I stashed some supplies in here and it's very lightweight. It's great. Water containers. I use this. It has three different compartments which allows me to keep my brush cleaner for longer. You can use anything you want. You can use cups, but a must, you must clean the water between your mixes in order to get true representation of what happens when you mix the colors, then you're going to need paper strips. Using this template. I make a whole row of these patterns and I can use smaller scraps two. Then I paint them. And after I've painted them, I cut them up. I also use these little strips so that I can see what I get in the form of a color wheel. Sometimes I have to make an extra one to get more information. These are very handy. These I take with me so that I see a true representation of the pigment. You'll need a tiny little scrap that will fit into your tin. This fits in here. Then you will need some contact paper. Clear. If this is shelving contact clear. And the purpose of that is to more or less laminate this so that you can keep it in here and it doesn't matter if it gets wet. I'll be showing you how to do that to Ziploc bags. This is the Ziploc bag that I use to keep all of my references in so that they stay dry because they don't laminate them all. And then this fits into a snack bag along with my ten. If I have a larger ten like this, this, or this, or this, then I'll use a sandwich size back. I'll put my information inside and then I'll drop in. I'll often put a paper towel in there too. You'll need a phone camera or a regular camera. You will also need paper. Just copy paper to print out your reference materials in the right size to fit into a Ziploc bag. You'll need a pair of scissors. You'll need a sketchbook. This sketch book works great for just three pigments. This sketchbook works great for the seven pigments. I like to see all the opportunities on one, either one page or one double spread. So that I can really get an overall feel for what that limited palette will give me. This sketch book, 123456. It has six rows. This is perfect for five pigment and I'll, I'll go over all of this. You can also use sketchbooks that you made yourself. So the more pigments you're using, the more room you need if you want to be able to see them all at one time. So you need to ten. You need your brushes. A pencil, permanent marker or fountain pen, Ziploc bags, strips, optional strips, wider strips. Palette, a camera or water container, a sketch book. Templates, scissors, contact paper, and paper towels, of course. The next step, I'll show you how to lay out your reference charts. 3. Making Your Own Templates: Welcome to the bonus lesson on making your own templates or making the patterns for color charting without using templates at all. I think it may be in my genes to want to steal a few things away from people every now and then. Not possessions because I I don't make a habit of stealing things, but I do make a habit of stealing excuses from people. And I suppose the reason it's in my blood is that a McCarter side on my dad's side, I'm related to the pirates appends, and so it's an easy thing for me to feel very comfortable stealing away your excuses. This lesson, I'll show you how to make your own color chart patterns. Even if you don't have templates. If you don't need to make templates, you can skip ahead to the next lesson. The first method is the easiest, the most basic. Take your pencil. Draw a square on that side. A square on this side, and a long rectangle in between. And then just go all the way down. One thing that's nice about this is that you can change the size if you want. If you're running out of room, you can make it smaller. If you have too much room, you can make it bigger. Okay. So I can get all of these strips on this page and there's nothing wrong with doing it this way. It's just a little tedious. Doesn't take that much longer than using a template. Just a little funky looking, which doesn't really matter at all. You can always do this when you're on the go. If you don't have any color charting with you, than simply make your own drawing it in your sketchbook. I have 123456789 on this page. That's eliminating all excuses right there. The next method, and I will do this right in the sketchbook, is to take a strip. This is file folder that I've cut. This is a half inch strip. This is a three-quarter inch strip. This is an inch strip. All of this color charting and color wheel making. It's to gather information about your pigments for you. Whatever feels the most comfortable for you is the way you should do it. If making a strip that's seven sixteenths of an inch wide, That's fine. The sizes are just suggested. I'm not even recommending any special size. I'm just showing you that any of these are solutions. It doesn't really matter. You could have one that snakes up and down. That might be kinda nice. Yeah, in fact, that might be real nice. I'll try that out after. Alright, so if you don't like using rulers and measuring, then you can just cut a strip and see, okay, About how many is that. Then using your strip as a ruler or straight edge, you can draw vertical lines on either side. Leave room for labeling what your pigments are. And then just eyeball it. Leave a space. You're just going to go all the way down. I don't mind having extra rows because then I can just add some color charting of my neutrals. Okay? If you want to draw the division down the space between, fine, but it's not really important. You don't have to erase. Now I'm going to show you how to cut a template that you can use the way you would use a normal template. I take a file folder. I tuck it in there. And I'm going to trace this to size, just a little bit smaller. I'm gonna go in just a little bit on the edge. Now this template will. Slip over the sheet and then I'll be able to trace my cutting board. Now you can use the squares on a board like this or on a piece of graph paper. If you have an aversion to using rulers. And I'm going to use half of it between. And I'll move my paper up so that I can go by that same measurement. Not being real exact, but that's okay too. It's for information. This isn't going to be published in a manual for color charting is just gonna be your own manual. And then I can just make notes down here, or I can make one more thin one. I want to leave enough down here so that my whole template doesn't fall apart back to probably won't cut this out because you want your template to be stable. And then mark this off, leave enough so that your template won't fall apart. Now I use an exacto knife and a metal ruler. And this you have to do very carefully because if you cut through here, your template is going to fall apart. So you have to be very careful just to cut the areas you want to cut. I forgot to draw this line and I'll show you. You don't have to do this. This makes it a whole lot harder to cut out. What I'm doing is just putting the gap between the square and the rectangle. Okay? So the first one I will cut out with the two squares and the rectangle. The second one, I'll just do the whole rectangle across. And then you can just mark that. I'll show you that. I don't press real hard. It's better to do two cuts or three cuts. Then to press too hard. Because that's where you won't have control and you may not stop soon enough. This is not my most fun job. That's why I purchased my templates. But I do make my own templates. When I don't have the size that I want, I don't cut circles. And in the reference materials of this class, I gave you the information about where I got my templates. Again, be very careful you want to overcome just a little bit so that it falls out. And if it doesn't fall out, you can just make that last little cut. Whatever way is best for you. You can do one row at a time. Or you can make all the horizontal cuts first and then all the vertical cuts for the vertical cuts first and then the horizontal. Okay, let's see if we don't be in a hurry. If you're in a hurry, you're either going to make a cut that's too long. And we'll cut through this and you'll have to take this together and that's even more of a nuisance. Or are you going to cut yourself? Alright? So there's one way you have the two squares and then you have the rectangle. Second way is a lot quicker. Just go all the way across. And then down. In my sketchbook, Let's say all of these are cut out. Slip it over. In this way, can stay in my sketchbook. It's custom-made for this sketch book. So it's easy enough to leave it in there. And because it goes over the page, it won't slide around on you. Okay, So then you go with your pencil. Here. You have to hold it down a little bit because this is loose. Right? Now there are the two ways that they look. And if you want, you can either eyeball it or draw this in. Okay? And don't bother erasing these again, you're going to mark your paper. So that's how you cut your own templates. Here's the finished cut out template. I went the easy way and didn't cut up the squares. Now you have to hold down. If you want to hold it down. With that, it's easier to keep the center part stable because it is a thin piece of paper. And this goes a little faster than trying to move your hand around. Okay, there we are. And I'm not going to erase those because I don't want to scuff up the paper. It doesn't matter. I'm doing this for information. No, I like it to look much neater like that. That is okay to keep your eye out for packaging materials. This is fever tree tonic water. Perfect circle templates. Of course you're stuck with that size, but it is a great circle. Here's a large opening that we'll see through. And that works as a great rectangle for color charting. And then all kinds of packing material. Now this may not look very useful, but I've used it in my oil paintings and my large Acrylic paintings as templates for applying color. And it also, as I'll show you in a minute, it can also be used to make colored charter. You may not know how to photograph and shrink down the photos that you take. Okay. So in that case, you still don't have an excuse not to make these little sheets that fit into the Ziploc bag because you can also make your color charts really tiny. Okay. So I use this, well, I haven't used this, but you could use this to make charts. Now you can't see what you're doing. But at least you still get your charts. Okay, then I can put the colors right here, labeled them up there. For, if you want it to be longer, you can go the other direction. Of course this is not long enough, but then you can go back to this and maybe use the half-inch to trace that going down. So no excuses for not making little tiny charts. If that's what you have to do. Then the other template that I wanted to show you is circle template. These you can purchase online too. I like the thinner ones, the ones that are used for drafting. Drafting ones are made out of this same wonderful material and a bowl like this. And I'll give you links online. If you don't have those, then you find other circular things. And you trace around them. If you're using little pieces of paper. And I would use watercolor paper if you're not going to be shrinking down your chart, if you're just going to be making them straight on the paper to take with you Guys are you have primaries and secondaries. And if you want to draw a little circle for your tertiaries, you can do that too. These have to be really tiny. I would use a smaller circle than this one, but I just wanted to show you that you can use lids, you can use bottle caps, use anything you can find. No reason not to have a circular template made out of something. Alright, that's it on making your own templates. Let's move on to creating your charts. 4. Color Mix Charts Part One: Color Swatches: Now we'll start to make your color reference charts. I'll begin by showing you how I make the color swatches for each of the pigments. In my teens. I start with very clean water so that my pigments do not get contaminated with the water. You'll notice here that there's a little bit of green. So some blue has gotten in there. For these charts, I want to make sure my colors are pure. When I'm actually painting. I don't worry that much about it. And if I need it to be pure, I'll make sure to clean the pigments. I, I'm cleaning the pigment with a little bit of water until all that green is gone. And I see a little bit of contamination of pigment in here too. It's worth taking the time to make sure your pigments are clean and your water is clean for making these charts, I'm definitely not this fastidious when I'm actually painting. And we'll cover this part up so that I don't drip anything on my color swatches. I begin by dampening the upper section of my square, not the whole square, upper section. Then I make sure I don't go directly from here onto my paper. Because some of the pigments are very, very hard and they need to be softened up before I can get the results. I want I don't want to add too much water. I want the consistency to be that no thicker than whole milk, somewhere between 2% and whole milk. Now to begin with, I don't want a lot of pigment in my brush, so I'll brush it off. And I'll just put a little bit into the dampened water because I want to see how light it can be. Then I'll go back in and draw the paint down so that I have a lot of information in this one square. I know how light it can be and how dark it can be. And I think it can be a little lighter, so I've dampened it, cleaned it off, and I'm going to make this part even a little bit lighter. I'm going to keep repeating myself by saying, all of these charts are for information. The neatness, the messiness does not matter, the purity of color. And the amount of information you can get from your charts is what matters the most. Right now, down in this section, I want it to be as dark as it can be without being opaque. So again, it's not going to be the consistency of half and half. That's gonna be too thick. It's gonna be more of the consistency of whole milk. There's my first one. With the clean water. I dampen the top. Notice I'm rolling my brush rather than jabbing it in. Little bit better for the brush. Okay. Let's time. This is gonna be so intense. I'm going to wash the brush off a little bit first, grab a tiny bit of color so that I don't have to soak it up like I did the first one. Now that my water is clean, I can go for the third pigment, which is a blue of some sort. This is looking like a viridian. First glance, it looked like a blue. It's one of the reasons I do this. That's really hard to tell. I might have grabbed this ten if I didn't have these sheets I'm making, I may have grabbed this ten thinking that this was a blue. Because on the edge it looked like it was a fellow blue. Alright, I'll let those dry. I took the pigments out of the ten so that I could see if I mark them on the side. This had been a half pan of ultramarine blue that I used up. And then I used it to fill with what looks like yellow ocher. I'm not going to label this because I don't know who made it. And even though I'm pretty sure it's a yellow ocher, I'm still going to just leave it on labeled. This one was also an empty tin, but I did mark it and it's squirrel permanent magenta. So I wrote that down. This one is thaler green deep, also by squirrel. And I can put them back in the tendons. While I have these colors out, I'm going to make the little chart that fits in here. I just hand draw this and then I painted it. I'm looking for information, so I want a little bit to be darker and a little bit to show the transparency. It's not really important, but I might as well. Then I will also label this when it's dry. 5. Color Mix Charts Part Two: Color Mix Grids: We can now return to doing our mixes. Now I moved to my flat brush. I'll begin by mixing the yellow and the red. I will use two brushes for this. The first one will be to get enough yellow paint for mixing so that I don't have to keep washing it off. That's why I use two. The second one I'll use for the red, I'm going to mix a tiny bit of red into the yellow because the yellow is going to be changed so quickly by the red. And what I'm going for is different mixes. And I do want dilutions in this mixing. I often have a separate spot just for some really pale mixes like that. Because I use those especially for portraits of some kind. Now see that almost looks the same but not quite. It really does indicate the yellow in it. Now these are looking pretty diluted, so we're gonna get some more red. There we go. Look at how lovely that. I'm going into a separate spot here because I want it to be mostly yellow and just picking up too much of the red. Right now I'm going to look at these and see what is my closest to what I would call an orange. Pretty neutralized. But overhear. Or somewhere in here. I need to put my orange. I think I'll put it in here. I may not even paint these and we'll see what it all looks like at the end. And I'll want a piece of scrap paper for this. See if I can come up with something that I would call an orange. Really mucky brown. That might be my orange. It's good to know this ahead of time. In this magenta, there's a lot of red and blue, which of course there is because magenta is a red violet. So it means it has blue and red. When you mix blue, red, and yellow, you get a neutral. And since it's mostly red and yellow, you get more of a brown, then you do a gray. The next one is going to be yellow and green. Move this around. So this is my LO and that will be my green. Again, I have my yellow brush. But I'm going to use different sections because none of these are clean. Now the yellow, remember it's going to be tinted very, very quickly. I don't mind having those variations. It's giving me information. And if some luck too much the same role, it's still wet. You can go over it because it's still the same two colors. Lovely surprises sometimes. Well, I have some greens. I'll put my green right there. Going for green that Well, that's pretty spot on green, that doesn't look too yellow green, or too blue-green. Up here. I'll put more of a yellow green. Work my way down through the greens, adding a little bit more blue each time. So that gives me a nice range there. I'm gonna go for a more yellow, green. Because I know there aren't many oranges. I'm gonna go for an even more yellow green up there. Whatever you think will be useful to you as what you put in these charts. You know, what it is, you know, the colors that you like, you know, what kind of subject matter color schemes you enjoy painting. While I have all three of them all mucked up. I'm going to paint in the neutrals down here, which I indicate by putting strips of all three. And then I can just muck about anywhere I want. I find I make a good black. I'll put it over here. And I'll also try to get my brown brown. You learn a lot about mixing and what you can mix with your colors by doing this, even if you use up all your paint, you learned an enormous amount. My brown. And even though I've done this so many times, I still learn something new. Now some of these colors look pretty yucky next to each other, but combine them in different ways and each one is pretty gorgeous. Start with the red and mix it with the green. And I'm thinking that the green is stronger than the red. So I'm going to add a tiny bit of green to the red to start with beautiful mixes here. All right, now I can fill in this a little bit. Let's see what I have for a real purple. I'll finish up by doing the oranges. There won't need very much of the red. 6. Color Mix Charts Part Three: Color Wheel Strips: The next step is to make my color wheel swatches. Color wheel swatches are to be used like this. These are placed end-to-end and you end up with a color wheel. Now I'm going to make those colors scripts for this palette. And while I'm doing it, I'm going to make larger ones for my studio reference, not ones that I take along traveling. But since I'm doing this with these colors, I'm gonna do this while my paintings raft or here I'll start with my yellow. Trying to get lots of information, lots of different mixes, just with those two pigments. Let those dry. So you can see now why you might need a reminder of why in the world you would want to do that. Let's say we haven't really gotten much of an orange, some nicer yellow, brown or Sienna kinds of colors there. Then I got here. I'm going to demo the other two of these. And then I'll briefly go through the four pigment, the five pigment, the six pigment, and the seven pigment colors just in terms of the layout, to make sure that you understand how to use these charts. I decided to make another red and yellow one, a little bit less red. Another reason I like to make these larger strips is because it does give me more information. It's easier to make the big strips because there's more room for the colors to mix. And for me there's a lot more that I can tell about the nuances of color and mixing these two in this big strip a lot more than shows in the little strip. So if I make this, I may want to make a second little strip. Now this is so tedious for me. I mean, this is not something that I totally love doing, but I love the information that I get from it and that's why I do it. So I would never make a bunch of these after making this one and say, well, I think there's more information I could get that would just wouldn't do it. But after I make the big one, and I see what I've learned here, I might go back and make a second one, and I might not take both of them with me when I leave with my little travel kit. But maybe I would, you know, here I see this beautiful color, that transparency. I don't see in this one. I'm not going to go back and change that one. But it lets me know that there's something more here. I made two of these because this was the first one I made and I wasn't sure I needed to know what some lighter dilutions of this might be. So I made this one. And certainly in the studio, I keep all of these and use all of them. This is the one I'll take with me. Those are the reasons going back to why I do this at all. It's for information. It's not to make beautiful strips. It's to discover beautiful colors. While making the reference materials that I can then bring with me when I'm painting plan air, when I'm painting a parking lot somewhere in a studio, in a coffee shop. It doesn't matter where. I'll have that information with me in one little Ziploc back in the studio. I'll have all this information. And then I have all of this. So that's pretty remarkable. Here we have all of the reference materials that we've just created. We have the color swatch strips. We have the labeling of what's in this ten. We have the variations, the different mixes that we can make with each of the combinations. The yellow with the red, the yellow with the blue, the red with the blue. And then we have a selection of neutrals that we can make when mixing all three together. Then we have the mixes here that are similar to this, which are the color mixed strips that form a color wheel. Then we have the larger version of those same color strips. And we have the primaries, secondaries, the black, the brown, and the tertiaries, all the way around. So that's quite a bit of information. The next step is that I will photograph these, shrink them down, and make them the size that I can print out on my printer. Cut and fold up to fit into my little tin. 7. Labeling Grids Part One: 4 Pigments: This next section of the class will be broken into four separate parts. The first part, we'll cover the layout for, for pigments. The second part, we'll cover the layout for five pigments. The third part we'll cover the layout for six colors. And this, I'm showing probably one of my most unique little kits that uses the bottle caps for the fever tree tonic water that I drink as the pans for the paints in case you didn't watch how to make the travel kit to begin with. And one of my other classes, I'll be showing you how I squeeze the tubes of paint into the pans and then I let it harden a bit if I'm gonna be traveling. So that doesn't just goop everywhere. I'll show you the details of that in that section. And that's part three of this session. And the last part, part four of this section, we'll be showing you the layout for seven colors. And this is one of those. It's a stainless steel business card holder. That the reason the hole is drilled in there, I drilled the hole and because this is the palette that I use when I'm painting while para gliding with my son because of COVID, I wasn't able to travel out there to fly with him. So these have gotten pretty dry and I was using my other tins while I was at home in New Jersey. I'm going to replace these with fresh pigment when we get to that section for just to let you know these little tens or cosmetic tens, empty cosmetic tins that I get wholesale or a God, I imagined that they're still around from TK be trading.com. And that will be in your reference materials along with these other sheets. This sheet, as well as the PDF of the measurements that I use. You will have to adjust these depending on what size tins you have, what size zip-lock bags you use. But if you use the same sizes that I have, these dimensions will work for you. This is part one of this section. These are my four pigments in a mini Altoid ten. I have a warm yellow, a cool red, a warm red, and I believe a warm blue. First thing I'll do is take these out of the ten so that I can see if I've marked them and I know what exactly they are. This isn't labeled, so I'm going to call this warm yellow. This also isn't labeled to all call that cool red. This is labeled and it's vermilion made by Sennelier. This is not labeled, so I'm just going to call this warm blue after I test it. Yes, it's definitely a warm blue. And I happen to know that this is ultramarine blue. Because I remember when I filled multiple tins with the ultramarine blue for a class I taught. I've put these back in the ten and I change the arrangement because I like to keep everything in the same direction of the color wheel that my brain thinks. So I have yellow at the top. Blue will be my next Primary going clockwise. The cool red will be next to the blue because it's closest two, blue rather than yellow. And then the warm red will be between the cool red and the yellow because that's the way it is. On my color wheel. I've already marked my black line to determine the opacity or the transparency level of the pigments. I will label this since I don't know the name, I will label it warm yellow. My yellow can be mixed with my blue, with my cool red, with my warm red. That's three mixes, 123. I'll work in a clockwise direction. So my yellow with blue, this I'm calling ultramarine blue. Next I can make my yellow with my cool red. Next I can mix it with my vermilion. Alright, so now I'm done with all my yellow mixes and you see it's 123. I'll move on to the blue. The ultramarine can be mixed with these three. You have the ultramarine with a cool red, ultramarine with a warm red, and ultramarine with the yellow. Ultramarine with the cool red. Do I have that yet? Know? Ultramarine with the vermillion? Do I have that yet? No. Do I have ultramarine with the yellow? Yes, I do. Here's the warm yellow and the ultramarine, so I don't have to make another row of that. I can move on to the cool red. Cool red with a million. Do I have that? No. Cool red with the warm yellow? Do I have that? Warm yellow, cool red. Do I have the cool red with the ultramarine? Yes, I do. So I have all the cool red mixes. Now. The last one is the vermillion. Vermilion can be mixed with the yellow. Do I have that? Yes, warm yellow vermilion. Vermilion can be mixed with the ultramarine blue. Do I have that? Yes, ultramarine blue vermilion. Vermilion can be mixed with the cool red. Do I have that? Yes, cool red vermilion. I have all of these combinations. I have 123 yellows, I have 123 blues, I have 123 cool reds, and I have 123 vermilion. And I have 1234 squares that indicate the opacity or transparency of each of these, the warm yellow, the ultramarine blue, the cool red, and the vermilion. But this is the layout for all the mixes. Mixing only two pigments at a time. For a for pigment palette, I will label this page mini Altoid, ten, warm yellow, ultramarine, cool red and vermilion. That's the layout for this ten. Now I'll go ahead and paint in just these squares. Easiest to soften the paints first. There's your grid layout for your, for pigment. Ten. I got in the habit when I was teaching color theory by using the color scheme game of clarifying between warm and cool. I'll make myself a color wheel. This is gonna be my yellow. I only have one yellow. Now my blue will be over here. And I have only one blue. So I'll leave that like that. I have two reds. So one way to do that, to create the red. And then because I have a warm red and a cool red, I'll divide this. And when I painted in, you'll see what happens. I'm going to put my cooler red here because my cool red is closer to blue than it is to yellow. My cool red has a bit of blue in it. My cool red does not have any yellow in it. There's my clean read. Now I'll paint in my vermilion. Alright, so I have my warm red and my cool red. And you will see, you will find out very quickly when you start making these mixes, that when you mix your blue with your cool red, you get lovely violet, red, violet, blue-violet. They are not very neutralized because the blue, warm blue, the furthest away of the blues from yellow, whether you call ultra marine warm or cool is up to dispute. I call it a warm. What most people agree with is that on the spectrum in the round color wheel, ultramarine blue is the closest to read of all the blues. When you mix a warm red with the ultramarine, you will not get the beautiful violets that you get with the cool because there is some yellow reflected back in the warm red. What happens when you combine all three primaries? You get a neutral. So by adding red, warm red to your blue, you're really adding some yellow to your blue to, and you'll see over here where your ultramarine blue and your vermilion are. This line will be quite neutral. In fact, I'll even demonstrate that right away you can see that these are much more violent than these. Going back to the vermillion, I'll just make some darker mixes. It's not that one is better than the other or more beautiful than the other. It's how you use them together. Every single color changes when it's put next to something else. These are beautiful colors. There we are. You can clearly see the difference between mixing the ultramarine blue and the cool red and the ultramarine blue and a warm red. From here, you can add circles in your wheel so that you can see your secondaries and tertiaries. That's up to you. Again. Whatever works for you, whatever you want to know. And over here you can put other charts, as you saw with the three pigment, whatever for you as the most useful way to use this page is what you should do. Then this will be photographed and shrunk down and fold it up and put in your little Ziploc bag. 8. Labeling Grids Part Two: 5 pigments: This is the grid layout for my five pigment palette. This is a little tin that says on it white German cologne. So I call it the white German cologne tin. And inside I have five pigments. I have a lemon yellow, a cadmium red light, and opera, a Joe's blue, which is a thin yellow blue and ultramarine blue. Now I wrote out, I labeled the top with my tin name and the five pigments that I have in here. And then I went ahead and labeled these correctly, I thought, but when I got to the end, I realized that I had made a mistake because I was missing a line for the cadmium red light. So I went back, tracked it back, and realized that I had marked the ultramarine blue to be the first mix with Joe's blue. And that belonged up here. So I crossed it out and moved everything into the proper place. It's much better to find out that an error has been made when you're just labeling. Then after you've painted the colors in. Here is another method that I've come up with to present to you to make sure that you have things in the right order when you go ahead and label them. Now, I haven't done this before, but I think I may do this from now on. For every pigment. It can be mixed with every other pigment. So the yellow can be mixed with the phthalo blue, the ultramarine blue, the opera, and the cadmium red light. So we have 1234 mixes. 1234 mixes, and it's the same for all of them. I listed the Jos blue, three more lines, ultramarine blue, three more lines, opera, three more lines. Cadmium red light, three more lines. This way. I know that all of these have to be on this grid. We really only need 12345678910 rows. I'm going around clockwise. The lemon yellow can be mixed with the Jos blue, the ultramarine blue, the opera, and the cad red light. Those are the four options. Joe's blue goes with the ultramarine blue, the opera, the cad red light, and the lemon. The ultramarine blue goes with the opera. The cad red light, the yellow, and the Jos blue. The opera goes with the cad red light, the lemon yellow, the Jos blue, and the ultramarine blue. And the cad red light goes with the lemon yellow, the Jos blue, the ultramarine blue, and the opera. Those are all of the combinations. I can look here. I have the lemon yellow and the Jos blue. I have that one. The lemon yellow and the ultramarine blue. I have that one. Lemon yellow opera, I have that lemon yellow cadmium red light. I have that. Joe's blue, ultramarine light. Ultramarine light. See there's another mistake. Ultramarine blue. I have that. Joe's blue opera. Joe's blue, cadmium red light. Joe's blue lemon. Well, where's that? Joe's blue lemon is over here. Joe's blue and lemon. So yes, I have that. Moving on to the ultramarine, ultramarine blue and opera. Ultramarine blue, cadmium red light, ultramarine. Whoops, that's the opera ultra marine, blue and yellow. Do I have that? Let's see. Yes, I do. With the lemon yellow, ultramarine blue. I have that ultramarine blue and Joe's blue. Look at Joe's blue and ultramarine blue. So yes, I have that. Opera, opera and cadmium red light opera and lemon yellow back over here, lemon yellow opera. I have that opera. And Joe's Blue Jays blue opera. I have that opera and ultramarine blue. I have that opera and ultramarine blue. Now the last one is the cadmium red light. Okay, I don't have anything here. Cadmium red light and lemon yellow. Cadmium red light, lemon yellow, cadmium red light. And Joe's blue cadmium red light, and Joe's blue. Cadmium red light ultramarine blue. Cadmium red light ultramarine blue, cadmium red light an opera. Cadmium red light an opera. Okay. I know that I have all of my mixes. Now I can go ahead and follow the labeling to paint in my colors just for my squares first as I did before. Then it's really hard to make a mistake when I start to do my mixes because I have both ends. My strip painted in. These three extra ones can be for neutrals. I'll just label that. Now. I'll paint these in the blue. I'm making sure that I have a diluted portion of the square so that I can see transparency in the dilution and also in a more saturated version of the pigment because it's pretty dark pigment. I'm changing my water after working with the yellow and the blue because I don't want to mix blue with the red or yellow with the reds. This is the labeled grid for the five pigment palette. We have 1234 lemon yellows, 1234, Joe's blue, 1234, ultramarine blue, 1234 Opera, and 1234 cadmium red light. And these are extra rows to mix neutrals. Now we'll move on to the sixth pigment palette. 9. Labeling Grids Part Three: 6 Pigments: Welcome to part three of labeling your grids. In this video, I'm working with six pigments. This time, I'm going to use a peppermint ten, very thin ten that's actually bent a little bit here. Supposed to be, fits in the pocket really well. Slides open. This comes off. I have in here £6. The pans are, as I showed you earlier, the caps to the fever tree, tonic water. What I'll do first is squeezed my paints into the palette. And if I were going to be traveling with this palette, I would wanna do that about a week before I leave so that the wet tube paints will have a chance to dry a bit and they won't run all over each other when the palate tips. Another feature of this ten is that I put magnets on the bottom. These are just the adhesive self-adhesive business card magnets. And I put it right on the bottom of the ten, and that way the bottle caps don't fall out. I can also use the empty cosmetic tins and they're thin enough. This doesn't hold very much paint. That's why I prefer to use bottle caps when I have a tin that's nice and thin, but just deep enough for me to slide the lid on. I'll start with the yellow on the top, as I normally do, and then work my way around clockwise. This is a Payne's gray, this is a neutral. So I am going to put that probably between my red and my yellow because this is the way that these pigments would be on a color wheel. This is the Winsor yellow. This is an olive green, which is actually a bit of a neutral. And it's a yellow or green than a blue-green. So it's about there. This is the answer, quinone blue. And that is what I consider a cool blue. It's closer up to the green glow, then to the lavender. This is a violet lake and this is an Alizarin crimson, which is a cool red. So we're really missing our warm reds into what would mix as an orange. I'm just going to put the Payne's gray there. This will be the yellow, olive green, the blue, the violet Lake, and the Alizarin crimson, and the Payne's gray. Sometimes I perhaps are easy to take off and sometimes they're hard. If I have one that's really stuck, I'll show you my trick to getting it open. Looks like I got lucky and all the paints opened up easily. You'll have to wait for another video to see my trick. Winsor, yellow, olive green, anther, a quinone, blue, violet lake, Alizarin, crimson, and Payne's gray. This is the grid for this six pigments palette. Winsor yellow because they're olive green is there. And through a quinone blue is there. Violet lake is their permanent carmine is there. And Payne's gray is there. This page can be used for a totally different six pigment palette. So this should start to look familiar to you now. This pattern of large, smaller, smaller, no space at all. This is the 54321. I made another one of these sheets so that I could label these squares properly. I'm going to just keep going around this way. The Winsor yellow goes with the olive green with the blue. That's a hard word to say. So I'm just going to call it blue. The violet lake, the carmine and the gray. The olive green goes with the blue. Violet Lake. Permanent carmine, the Payne's, gray, and the Winsor yellow. They answer a quinone blue goes with violet Blake, permanent carmine. Payne's, gray, Winsor, yellow and olive green. Violet lake goes with permanent carmine. Payne's gray, Winsor, yellow and olive green, and an anthro quinone blue, permanent carmine. It goes with Payne's gray, Winsor, yellow, olive green, anthro quinone blue. I'm getting better at saying that. And violet lake, the last one, Payne's gray, goes with Winsor, yellow, olive green, anther, quinone, blue, violet lake, and permanent carmine. Now I can transfer this information to hear the Winsor yellow with the olive green. Even this way, I ended up skipping one by mistake. Winsor yellow with olive green. Winsor yellow with them theft CRA known blue. Winsor yellow with violet lake. Winsor yellow with permanent carmine. And Winsor yellow with this is Payne's gray onto the olive green. Olive green with anthro quinone blue. Okay. Olive green with violet lake. Olive green with permanent carmine. Olive green with Payne's gray, olive green with Winsor yellow blob here I have Winsor yellow with all the green. So all of these are good. And all of these are okay. Anthro quinone blue with violet lake, and track one on blue with permanent carmine, anthro cannon blue with Payne's gray. Anthro quinone blue with Winsor yellow that's up here, Winsor yellow and through quinone blue and anthro, quinone blue with olive green. And that's up here. Olive green with anthro quinone blue. Moving on to violet Lake. Violet lake with permanent carmine. Violet lake with Payne's gray. Violet lake with Winsor yellow, that's up here. Violet like Winsor yellow. Violet lake, olive green, violet lake, Anthony Quinton blue, violet lake, and through quinone blue onto permanent carmine. Permanent carmine is this bottom one right here. And permanent carmine with Payne's gray and that's written out there too. So this is the row for permanent carmine, Payne's gray. Then we need permanent carmine and Winsor yellow. We have that right here. Permanent carmine, Winsor yellow. We need, we need permanent carmine and all of green, olive green, permanent carmine, olive green, permanent carmine, anthro quinone, blue and orange and blue. Permanent carmine, anther quinone blue. Permanent carmine, violet like violet lake. Permanent carmine. Payne's gray, Payne's gray and Winsor yellow. Payne's gray and olive green. Olive green. Payne's gray and olive green. I don't know if I should be checking these off again. Okay. Payne's gray and anthro acronym blue endocrinology. Blue Payne's gray. Payne's gray. Payne's gray by the lake. And Payne's gray. Permanent carmine. Permanent carmine, Payne's gray. They're all there. Now I'll paint these in. You've seen me paint a lot of these already. So I will just show you what I'm gonna do here is just spray a little bit of water on it. And then I'll use these. This is the completed mixing grid for the six pigment palette. Up next is part four. In part four, I'll show you the grid that's labeled 47 pigment palette. 10. Labeling Grids Part Four: 7 Pigments: This is part four of labeling your grids. In this part, we're gonna be talking about the seven colors. And for seven colors we need 21 rose just as a little bit of a refresher to figure out how many rows you need. You take the number of colors and you subtract one. That's six, subtract another, 54321, add these together, that's 1115182121. Rose is what you need for a seven pigment palette in order to see what you get when you mix every combination of two pigments together. Because that's so many rows. And because I still like to carry the real ones with me when I can. I chose to do it in this book. And I've turned it this way. So I have 123456 change color, 12345 changed color 1234, change color 123, change color one to change color one. And I have an extra row for neutrals. I've already put in my black lines that will indicate the opacity and transparency of each of the colors. I'll be testing out seven colors using this ten, this business card tin. But I'm going to replace these old dried up colors with some new color. And I'll just transfer these two another ten. When I looked through my tubes, I realized I had a number of different cobalt blue, a number of different Antwerp blues. I wasn't quite sure which I would choose. So I grabbed them all and I decided that I would do some of my color swatches first so that I could see what I wanted to pick for my seven pigments. What I found fascinating is that all of these are Winsor Newton cobalt blue. This is actually a cobalt blue deep. These three, while I don t know about this, I'm assuming that this is the professional grade because this had been one of my teachers tubes that is struggled. She gave me an awful lot of her supplies when she stopped painting due to illness. So this, I'm assuming that she wrote Coby on here. She was great about labeling things. And I don't think she ever used the Cotman the student grade, so I'm assuming that that's the professional grade. This is the Cotman, which is the student grade. I want to point out the differences in all of these. This cobalt blue deep looks to me to be pretty identical to an ultramarine blue. And indeed this one, which is the cobalt blue hue. And hue means that there's not as much pigment in it. And usually the student grades are hues rather than pure pigment. This says ultra marine. In parenthesis on this. Both of these are Winsor Newton. Both of these are the professional grade Winsor Newton. And this one has the pigment names numbers and this one doesn't. So I don't know, both of these are raw sienna. I can see a big difference between the two. This one glows a lot more. This one is more neutralized than this. Over here we have Antwerp blue. And all of these are the professional grade of Antwerp blue. They have different numbers because they're different years. This is the only one that has the pigment number. But look at these differences. This one, especially this one is so different from these. This is another reason to make these swatches because what if you were working on a painting, you ran out of paint and you grab one that says Antwerp flu. And you grab this one, and you're going to end up with completely different mixes. Over here. If you ran out of ultramarine blue, you could grab the cobalt blue deep and you would be just fine. So it's good to know what you can switch out and what you can't switch out. A little bit of a test even on a piece of scrap paper is a good idea. This is the palette that I've chosen for my seven pigments. I have Sennelier, red, cadmium red, light, raw sienna, cadmium, lemon, Antwerp blue. It's the most turquoise version of the Antwerp blue, cobalt blue hue. This is the student grade Cotman, and this is an ivory black. So I don't put you through the agony of watching me paint all these n I'm going to paint in each of the seven pigments and just show you a snapshot of the pattern as it developed. So here are the six yellow squares. The next will be the Antwerp. I couldn't get this. This one. The one that was an odd ball Antwerp out of the tube. I can access it either by cutting the tube or digging down in that way. But I didn't want that to be a big issue. So I've swapped this out for another Antwerp blue. So I'm going to use this Antwerp blue instead. You can now see the six rows starting with yellow, five row starting with blue. And the sixth blue square is up with the yellow because this is what's going to be mixed. And when you're looking at the whole chart, this is what you see. Next, I'll add the cobalt blue. Here's the grid with the six yellow. 123456, Antwerp blue, 123456, cobalt blue. Here's the pattern with the black added. There are six yellows, six Antwerp blues, 456 cobalt blues, and 3456 IRI blacks. And you'll see that this is getting smaller. Six cubes, five cubes, four cubes, three cubes. And these are starting to repeat themselves. Here we have the blue black, blue black. And you'll see with each step that this will just be like beads on a necklace that are in the same pattern. Now I've added the snail II Wrath 65, Four, 32, blue black red, blue black, red, black red. Now I'll add the cadmium red light. Here's the grid with the cad red light added. Reviewing the pattern, 654321. Here. One more color to go. This is the completed grid with the squares painted in. The next step, of course, for this is mix each of the two colors on either end. So now we've gone through the gridding for us. Three pigment palette, for pigment palette, five pigment palette, six pigment palette, and a seven pigment palette. In the next lesson, I'll show you how I photograph these reference charts and pull them into a format that I can print out on my printer. 11. The Last Few Steps: When it comes to photographing my information, I usually film it and my actual studio where the light seems to be a bit more natural. I also will take a set of photos outside where the light is the sunlight rather than any artificial light. Lately, I've been using the 11 Pro iPhone to do my photography. I can set it to be either a square format, a four by three format, or a 69 format, which is video format. And it just saves me so much time. I love it because we all have different phones, different cameras. It's really going to be up to you to find a place to photograph your reference materials where the light will be most beneficial to produce the results that are closest to your original grids. That's an issue all on its own. The reason that I bring these with me is because I have the reality. Then the printouts of this, I can adjust. You'll find your own way. I'm sharing with you the way that it's been working for me. And I tweak it all the time so that the information I have with me is the best information I can bring with me at that time. So I will photograph this whole thing and then I will photograph close-up of this are close up of that close-up of these different things. And when I am bringing them into the 8.5 by 11 format that I'll use to print. I will make choices than as to which of these photos would be most beneficial to me. I think you'll understand that a little bit better in the next step where I show you what I do on the computer. If you're not using a computer, you can skip this whole stage and go back to making them the right size to stick into your Ziploc bag in the beginning. And then these are originals. They're gonna be perfect. They're going to be the colors that are absolutely spot on. You may want to do this. In addition to doing all of this, I don't know. It depends on how much you can stand doing this tedious work. The photos I've cropped in Photoshop. The first method I'll show you is one in which I use the software pages on a MacBook Pro to just pull the images in and resize them. On an 8.5 by 11 page, I used the landscape layout. I then get rid of all of the margins in the document tab. Then I pull in my photos one at a time. I re-size each one so that it will fit. The small plastic bag. The longer ones I'll fold to fit into the back. And then I print it. In this example, I'm going to pull the photos into a format that I've created in Adobe InDesign. I pulled photograph right into the rectangle that I've created. And then I can resize it. I can set it to fit the frame and then adjust it from there. There are a number of tutorials online by people that are much better at teaching you how to use Word documents and Adobe InDesign. When I complete setting it up, I sand the page to the printer. These are the two sheets I just lay out. This is the sheet printed out from the pages when I pulled the images into the pages document and just re-size them to fit onto the 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper when printed. This sheet is a result of pulling the images into Adobe InDesign and sizing the images to fit the way I wanted them to. Both of them will work. These are the two sheets cut up and you'll see that they all fit into the bags. I generally will put one that shows the tin I'm using on top. And in this case, I've gotten in the habit of putting the tin and the selection on top, because if I slipped the ten in here too, it will be covering up the page that might be showing on that side. All of these slip in here and this I fold. I put that It's in there. And if you want to slip the tin into, you can do that. The other option is to slip this bag and a ten into a snack. There you go. Your extended watercolor travel kit is now complete. In the next video, we'll review what we did in this class. And I'll give you a few ideas of how you can use the information you've just put together. 12. Review and Moving On: I'd like to review what I covered in this course. I talked about templates. The templates that I use. Templates that you can make yourself. And what we use them for. We use them for making color swatches. We use them for making color mix grids. We also talked about making your own cards that are the right size to fit into the plastic bags. If you don't have a printer to print up the photos of these. We talked about the two different sizes of the color wheel strips. I talked about how to use templates that you can find and boxes that have been shipped to you. I also talked about the dimensions that I use when I make my own templates. The PDF of this is in your reference area. I told you how to figure out how many rows you need, depending on how many colors you have in your palette. This was an alternative way to keep track of making sure that you have all the combinations of pigments mixed only two at a time. We went through making all of the reference materials for our three pigment palette. This was in a small sketchbook where you have the color mix grid. We have a color wheel. We have the block, we have the brown, and we have the color wheels strips in a sketchbook, as well as the ones that go with you when you travel and the ones that you keep in your studio. I then went through making the color mix grids for, uh, for pigment palate. And then the layout and painting in the squares for our five pigment palette. And when we got to the sixth pigment palette, I showed you how to make your own travel tin with bottle caps. I talked about the importance of making color swatches for all the tubes of paint that you have, even when it's the same name, by the same manufacturer. These were cobalt blue by Winsor Newton. These are both Antwerp blue by Winsor Newton. And there were others too, but those are already in kits. Finally, I showed you the layout for a seven pigment tin painting in the squares. I then went over explaining how I go from the sketchbook to printing out the small pieces of paper that fit nicely into the plastic envelope. Here's an example of charts that were made up directly on the watercolor paper that are true to color because they are not photographed and reprinted. And you can see that it all fits nicely into the tin two. So you don't have to have access to a camera or software, or computer software or design layout software or a printer. Remember what one of the main reasons was for making these? It so that I can easily go through my multitude. I've traveled tens and see what kind of colors, schemes, and color mixes I can get from the paints that are in my tin without having to open it all up and open the tin. That is huge. All of this time spent making the grids is useless unless you use the materials, use the reference grids that you made. One way is to take them with you so that when you paint outdoors, when you're painting planner, you have something to reference. Two comes in so handy and you'll find that you'll be mixing colors and using colors that you wouldn't have otherwise, because you just automatically would go back to the standard things you use or the colors you see right in front of you. Instead of being inventive with your color, you can also use these in your studio. You don't have to be traveling with. Here I was just playing with variations of color choices. Keeping the value is the same but changing out the colors. I wouldn't have thought to use these colors except that I had charts. And then last thing that I'll suggest to you is to make little dot cards. This is just some fairly stiff watercolor paper. And I took some of my many, many tubes of paint that I don't use, haven't used in many, many years. Squeezed a little bit out. You don't even have to squeeze as much out. It could be half that amount. And draw the color out a bit with water, label it. And then you can use this as your palate. If you cut them to the size of a ten and let them dry wealth, you could stack 34, maybe even five of them inside of a tin when you go somewhere. And that way if you find yourself in London and it's a gray day, you have a palette for a gray day. If it's a sunny day, you're not if the Greek because you also have a palette for a sunny day, then if you go down to Provence, the light is completely different. And you can have a palette for that. And you don't have all the the bulk. Even at the mini ten, you would need a lot more space to have six of these. Then you need, if you have six of these. And certainly the reference materials don't take up much space. When you do go out plein air painting, don't forget your wrists. Ok. Your wrists OCT is for cleaning off your brush. In water. Clean off your brush. It's very handy. I never leave home without it. We've come to the end of this course. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope that you've learned something and that the materials that you've put together for yourself will be incredibly useful for you. And you'll find that your work really improves by understanding your color better and understanding the incredible number of options that you have. Just a few pigments. If you haven't taken the pulling the puddle course, I think you'll find that also very useful. That's where you'll learn how to put in your backgrounds without streaks had graduated from dark to light. How to change a little bit of the color from green, yellow to a yellow. There are several different pulling the puddle courses. Each one covers a different aspect of it. I suggest you take part 1 first because that really shows you the technique. Let's see. I think you may also enjoy the color scheme game and the color value courses. All of these are building blocks to make you stronger artist and to help you hone your skills so that you can really have more fun with your art, with color, with line, with shape. I'm Chris Carter. I hope to see you again in another course.