Watercolor Essentials: Fun with Paint Swatch Color Guides

1. Class Introduction: I am Kelly Res, an artist teacher and designer. Today, I'll be continuing my watercolor essential series by walking through the process of swatching paint so that you can create your own paint color guide. Swatch cards are so useful when you paint because the color on the paint label or the color of dried paint doesn't always accurately show the color it will be on paper. There are lots of ways to create swatches of your paint. By the end of this class, you'll know how to create your own swatch guides using four different methods. Swatching is a functional tool, but it's also very relaxing and a great way to get to know your paint. This class is for beginners or anyone who wants to experiment more with watercolors. To follow along with my demonstrations, you'll need a watercolor brush. I'll use a size six round brush. Watercolor paints and a palette or plate if your paints aren't already in a palette like this pan palette. Watercolor paper. I'm using 140 pound cold press paper, a container of water and something to blot your brush like a paper towel or dish cloth. If you're excited about getting started with watercolors, check out the other classes in my watercolor essential series. You can find them on my profile page. Be sure to hit the follow button, so you're the first to know as I release more classes in this series. You can also join my e mail list to keep up with everything I'm working on. Let's make some swatches. 2. Your Project: In this class, I'll be walking through how to create four different types of swatch cards. Your project is to create a swatch card of your paints using one of the methods, then post a photo. If you want, you can create more than one swatch card. I'd love to see any and all of the cards you create. I'll walk through the entire process and when we're done, post a photo of your swatches along with any notes or thoughts you have. To add your project, go to the Projects and Resources tab and use the Submit project button. When you're done adding your project, use the green published button. You can see my example project in the class project section of that tab. I can't wait to see what you post. In the next lesson, we'll prepare all of our materials. 3. Preparing to Swatch: For my demonstrations, I'm going to use a set of pan watercolors. Feel free to follow along with whatever form of watercolors you have. If you have questions about tube or liquid watercolors, check out my class on paint brushes and paper for more information. The most important step to take prior to starting your paint swatches is to make sure you know how to find the names of the colors of your paint and to keep them in the same order as your swatching so that you can label your colors when you're done. For tube and liquid paints, the color name should be clearly labeled on the package. For this tube, you can see it says emerald green. For a liquid, we have gambos here. I happen to have a brand new set of pan paints, so I thought it would be helpful to show you how to find the color names on them as well. With pan paints, you can see the color name on the wrapper of the pan when it's brand new. This says lemon yellow hue. But once you've opened the wrapper, usually the name is still on the pan. You can see if I turn the pan to the side, it still says lemon yellow hue. These are Windsor and Newton cotton paints. Some brands might not have the name written on the side of the pan, but usually the names will be written on the original packaging of your paint or you can look up a color chart online. Now I'll grab a piece of watercolor paper. It's best to swatch your paint on the same type of paper you'll be painting on so that the colors and textures show accurately. This is 140 pound press paper. Again, if you want to learn more about watercolor paper, check out my class on paint brushes and paper. If you're using pan paints, add a few drops of water to each color before we get started so that the water can soak in and start to activate the paint. This will make your colors more saturated and accurate. To do that, I'm just going to dip my brush into my water and drip a few drops of paint onto each color. When you're done, make sure to rinse out your brush completely and make sure there's no pigment on your brush. Now that we have water on each of our colors, we'll let that sit for a minute. What the water does is it activates the pigments in the paint so that when you lay your paint down on paper, you get the station of each color. In the next lesson, I'll walk through creating a basic swatch card. 4. Basic Swatch Color Guides: L et's get into making a basic swatch color guide. Depending on how you want to use and store your swatch card, you can cut your paper down to a smaller size. I had a nine by 12 piece of paper and I've cut it in half. Just make sure you allow enough room to spread each color out of it. I'm going to look at my paper and estimate how much room I want to take up with each color. When I'm swatching, I like to lay the colors out in the same order and in the same rows that they are in the actual palette. That means I'll need six boxes on the first row and six boxes on the second row. When swatching paint colors it's useful to show the dark and light spectrum that the paint can cover. This means that I want to have a good amount of paint on my brush, but also enough water to let the color fade as we go along. If you want to practice this on a scrap piece of paper first, feel free to do that until you get the hang of the gradation. For my first color, I'll dip my brush in water and I don't want water dripping off the end, so I want to just tap it if there's any water dripping off the end. Then I'll add paint to make sure it looks like it's pretty full. I'll roll my brush in the paint. I'm going to leave room at the very top of my paper to put the brand and name of my palette and then I'm going to start my color row about right here. I'm going to lay my brush down with even pressure and go to the right up and down. As I'm coming to the right, I want to leave up on the pressure just a little bit so that I can get the lighter gradation of this yellow. I'll rinse my brush out completely. To check that your brush is rinsed out completely. You can wipe it on your blotting cloth and make sure you don't see any color there. Then we'll move on to the next color. D my brush in water, roll it in the paint. Making sure that it's pretty full. I'm going to lay my brush down, even pressure and let up a little bit as I get towards the right. I move on to my next color. Now that I have my first row done, you can see that as it's starting to dry that I'm getting a darker color on the left and a lighter color on the right, which is great because I can see the variation that I can get with these colors. Now that I have my first row, I'm going to a space right here so that I can write the names of each color once it's and I'm going to start my second row about right here. Again, leaving a space below so that I can write the names. If you have white in your palette, you'll notice that it doesn't really show up very well on your paper, white watercolor paint is usually used for mixing with other colors. Now that I've swatched each color, I'm going to let this dry completely, or I can use a hair dryer to dry it. Now that my swatch card is completely dry, I'm going to label it with the brand and name of the palette. I'll also label each color so that I can use it for reference later. And so that I don't have to dig out each of these pans, I'll just use the packaging to look at the names. That is our basic swatch card. Now when I go to make a painting with these paints, I'll be able to look at the accurate color on paper so that I can decide which colors to use in my painting. This is especially useful when you have multiple colors that are slightly different. With this palette, I have only a few colors of green and yellow and blue and red. But for a palette like I have here, I've made this with my Grumbacher Academy paints. You can see that I have a lot of different yellows and reds and greens. It's really useful to have a swatch card where I can see the colors and I can see the order to know which exact shade I want to use in my paintings. So now that we've made our basic swatch card, I'll show you a variation in the next lesson. 5. Individual Swatch Color Guides: In the last lesson, we made a swatch card that shows all the paint colors at once. But it can sometimes be helpful to have swatches of individual colors so you can overlap them and look at them together to choose colors for a painting. To make individual swatches, I'm going to use a pencil to draw a rectangle on my paper for each color. I'll make my rectangles about an inch and a half wide and 2 " tall, so I have enough room to show the variance of color as well as room at the bottom to label each color. I'll measure for the first one, but I'm just going to estimate after that. Feel free to measure each one if you want them to be really exact. Now, I'll draw a rectangle for each of my colors. I'm going to leave space in between so that I can overlap my colors, making it easier to paint and then getting a clean line when I cut them out. It doesn't really matter where they are on your paper because we're going to cut them out at the end. For each swatch, I'll add color on the top half and leave about the bottom half blank so that I can label the colors when I'm done. I'll start with my first color the same way that we did in the last lesson. I'll get some water on my brush, not dripping off, and I'll roll my brush in the paint. I'm going to set it down with even pressure a little bit more at the beginning and lifting up slightly at the end so that I can get that lighter color. I want to overlap my lines completely so that once I cut them out, I'll have clean lines and I can overlap each individual swatch. So I'll go for each of my colors now. I didn't quite get that one to the edge. I'm just going to add a little more right there. Make sure that you don't let your colors touch each other because then they'll blend together and we don't want that on a swatch card. Okay. So for this one, I didn't have quite enough paint. I'm just going to go ahead and start at the beginning again. This is an ideal but if you don't have quite enough paint, sometimes it's necessary. Xx next six, next, six, next, six, next, next, next 66 and next, next, next Again, here, I didn't get quite enough paint. These boxes are a little bigger than I was doing in the last swatch card. Sometimes you need to just make sure you're loading enough paint on your brush. Making swatch cards is also a really great way to just kind of get to know your paint and get to know your brushes a little bit. How much paint do you need on your brush, how water? Again, our white isn't really going to show up very much, but we're still going to swatch that. I'll go ahead and dry this and we'll come back and label. Now I'll label the name of each color before I cut these out. After I cut them out, if I want to, I can either clip all these together and label them with the name of the pack, the name of the brand and the name of the set or I can write the name of the set on the back of each one. Now I'll cut them all out. So now again, I can label the back with Windsor and Newton Cotman, if I want. S. Now I have a set of individual swatch cards that I can group to to decide on color combinations for paintings. You can see that you can overlap them and look at colors together on a light scale or a dark scale to decide which colors you want to use for painting. In the next lesson, we'll walk through creating a layered swatch color guide. 6. Layered Swatch Color Guides: The next type of color guide I want to show you how to make is a layered swatch sheet. The goal of this guide is to show how your colors deepen when you layer the same color over itself. To set up my page, I'll use a pencil and draw a rectangle for each color. I've cut my paper in half long ways for this one because I'll need a little bit more length for each color. I made the rectangle about 1 " tall and a little less than 2 " wide. Again, you can be as exact with us as you want, but I'm just going to estimate. For this guide, we won't be cutting these rectangles out. They'll be staying on this paper. For this swatch card, I'm going to show you first with the lemon yellow. I'll do each step and then I'll go through and do the rest of the colors. For the layered swatches, I'm going to use a little bit more even pressure than I did with the other ones because I'm not so much worried about the gradation because I'm going to deepen the color by layering it rather than by pressure of my brush. I'm just going to cover this whole rectangle with my lemon yellow. If I need to fill in a little bit more, I can just add some water because the goal is to have just an even wash of your color over the entire rectangle. Again, I'm going to do this first color and then I'll do the rest of the colors in a bit of a different order. Now I'm going to let this base layer dry or I'm going to dry it with the hair dryer. Now I'm going to come in with another layer of the yellow from about a third of the way across, filling the rest of the box. I'm going to dip my brush in water again, load up my brush, start about a third of the way in, and then fill the rest of the rectangle. I'm going to let this dry or use my hair dryer. And then I'm going to do the last third with one more layer of the yellow. Now we can see the tones that we can get with this yellow. Water colors can have a lot of variation in intensity just by using more or less water. But another way to deepen your colors is by layering them. This watch guide will help you see how deep or light your colors can be with layering. Now that I've done the lemon yellow and you see the process, I'm going to go ahead and lay the base layer for all my colors, dry them all at once, and then layer them up one by one. T I'll dry all these and add another layer. So again, for my second layer, I'm going to start about a third of the way across. I just fill in the rest of the box. I'll dry this. Now that our second layer is dry, we'll add the third layer. Starting about two thirds in and filling up the box. I'll go ahead and dry this last layer. A Now, I'll label my colors, and we'll come back and talk about the layering a little bit. Now that we have this guy done, you can go through and see how deep all of your colors can get, and you can tell that some colors get deeper as you layer them, and some don't really get that much deeper at all. So you can tell that the pigment in the loose, and it doesn't really as you layer it. That's a really useful thing to know as you're painting. For example, if you were painting bushes or something with the sap green and you wanted them to get a lot darker than this. You might need to add in another color like maybe your yellow ochre or maybe your burnt umber to get it a little deeper and darker in order to get those variations in the hue because you can't really get it with layering. Whereas if you were using the ultramarine and you wanted to get a really dark blue, you could probably just layer it to get that darker hue. That's a really useful thing to know about your paints. Again, these swatching exercises are useful so that you can have a color reference guide, but they're also really useful to get to know your paints and to understand what they can do for you. In the final lesson, I'll walk you through creating an extra fun type of swatch color guide. 7. Extra Fun Swatch Color Guides: A fun and useful way to store swatch cards is by putting them on the wall near where you paint. If they're on the wall, they double as an art piece. Why not make them more funky and artistic by drawing the palette or containers as well as each color. Even if your swatch card won't be displayed, this is still a fun way to play around with making it more artistic. The first step in this swatching method is to draw your palette or paint containers. Since this palette is pretty basic, I'm going to show you a few examples of other palettes that I have. I have this liquid set by doctor PH Martin, so I drew the actual bottle of each liquid. And then here's some core watercolor tubes that I have. To draw my palette, I'm going to use a waterproof pen rather than a pencil because I like having darker lines. But if you don't have something waterproof, a pencil will be a better choice so that you don't get any ink bleeding into your paint. If you're using a pen, it's important that it's waterproof. Another important thing to remember with this method is to draw your paint containers big enough to show your paint gradation, or you can even use the layering method. This might mean your palette or container drawing isn't to scale, but it's preferable to be able to use your swatches to see the variations in your paint. The last thing to remember is to make sure that you leave space to label your paint fillers. This is a pretty basic palette. I'm just going to go ahead and draw a big rectangle. I'm a pretty inexact artist. I like sketchy lines, so I'm going to make it even more funky there. I want to have six boxes on each level, but I want to leave a little extra room for showing me gradation. Here's my halfway line. Since I'm already practiced in the gradation, I'm going to make my boxes just a little bit smaller. And then I'm going to leave this line, even though there's not actually space there, I'm going to leave an area to label my colors. Again, my lines are extremely inexact. If you want them to be a lot more exact, totally go ahead and do that, but I actually like this funky look. Since this palette is actually boring in shape, I'm going to spice it up with a few extra details, and I can go back and add more of that once I'm done as well. I'm going to go ahead and add this little divot here for the brush. I'm going to use it to label my palette instead. Now that I've done the basic shapes, I think I'm going to go ahead and swatch my paints and then I can come back and add some more detail later. If I'm using a waterproof pen, I want to just make sure that that ink is completely dry before I start swatching. But then we're going to use the same process that we've been using the whole time. I'm going to go ahead and load some paint onto my brush, make sure I have enough water. Since this is a smaller area, I'm still going to try to show the gradation. I'm going to go he and then just lighten up on the right side here. And I'll go ahead and drive this. All right? I'll label the colors. Okay. Now that everything's labeled, I'm just going to go through and add a few more fun details. Just for a little extra fun. I think I'll add a path. There we go. A fun and functional paint swatch color guide that doubles a artwork. Stick around for some final thoughts. 8. Final Thoughts: I'm so glad you joined me for this class. We learned how to prepare and swatch paint colors using four different methods. I hope you'll use your swatch cards to reference and choose colors often as you paint. Be sure to post your project in the Projects and Resources tab. I'm excited to see what you've taken away from this class. I'd love for you to leave me a review. And if you have any questions, please post those in the discussions area as well. Finally, hit follow under my name so that you'll be the first to know when I release my next beginner watercolor class. You can also check out my profile to see the other classes I'm teaching or head over to my website and subscribe to my newsletter to stay in the now. Have a wonderful day. I'll see you next.