I love mixing different colour combinations and sometimes when I can't decide what to paint next or am feeling uninspired I will just get my paints out and play around with different mixes.

For this exercise I first tried out some rather special new handmade paints I treated myself to recently and it was a good opportunity to see how they performed. 

I then experimented with a completely new combination of colours with a vibrant aqua green that I got recently. Initially I thought it might be too bright for botanical paintings but mixed with a green gold it produced some gorgeous natural looking greens and then combined with a lovely bright quinacridone magenta some lovely more muted greens and then the loveliest purples mixing aqua green and magenta.

I also tried out some new handmade paper which I just got. I wasn't expecting it to be the best quality but trying out different mixes on that I found the colours to be really bright and vibrant.

Then back to my sketchbook for another combination which I haven't tried before and again discovered some new mixes that I really like. One could go on for ever :-)

I've also made a start at making individual colour swatches of my paint and think these will be useful rather than just having them in a sketchbook. I was wondering if there's a good way of storing them? At the moment I just have them in a box.