Watercolour Swatches and Colour Mixes

Just like any other art medium, watercolour swatches are as important as well. One of the first things to be done as soon as you unbox your paints is colour swatching. In fact art suppliers have even included the colour swatch cards with the paint product for your convenience.

Swatch cards act as labels for your colours where you apply the paint mix directly onto the card and note down the important info particularly the colour name, code and characteristics respective to the art brand.

So why the hassle? Well, simply because it will be a hustle if you do not organise and file a record of your colours.

Do you keep the labels of your watercolour pans? I doubt so. Even if you use only tube paints, over time the labels will get worn out.

In a nutshell, colour swatching helps artist to remember their paints as it acts as a catalogue to refer to before painting process and also when you need to consider a re-purchase. Overall it helps with organised work process.

What Details are Important?

Besides colour name and code number, these information indicates a paint's characteristics :

Lightfastness - resistance to fade when exposed to light (natural light especially)

Opacity - grade of transparency

Staining - to understand the ease of removing the pigment from paper

Granulation - paint properties that pool together creating marks or patches instead of a smooth even colour.

There can be more details noted according to Artist's need and product specification by Art Brands.

In case you lose the details of your paints, fret not as most of the professional art brands have the paint catalogue on their websites.

Link to in-depth discussion on Lightfastness, Staining and Opacity

https://ranwatercolour.wixsite.com/ran-my-art/post/is-your-watercolor-paint-fading-understanding-lightfastness-staining-and-opacity

Colour Mixing...Do they require a chart too?

Colour mixing is when you mix 2 or more paints to produce a new or different shade. This is part and parcel of any painting process. There are colour mixing charts readily accessible online or from art books.

However nothing beats the art of learning to make the colour mixes yourself and charting it.

As the saying "Experience is the best teacher" never gets old!

How to make and organise Colour Mixes?

As we were all taught in school, it all starts from the primary colours when you mix Red and Blue you get Purple (or Violet) while a mix of Yellow and Blue gives you Green. In fact this colour mixes can be witnessed in nature when you notice a Rainbow.

In painting, colour mixes helps to expand the colour pallet from a basic 3 primary colours to 6 and more. It gets more interesting as you start mixing all the colours available on your pallet yet that does not mean you mix all 12 colours together! Then you may arrive at a muddy looking shade which may be of no use at all.

The key is to focus on 2 colour mixes on your pallet and in order to do this just create a table and list the same colours in rows on the left and columns on the top.

Mix the colours diagonally as you move towards the right of the table. Fill in the cell with the mixed colours accordingly.

And if you arrive at the same colour type then leave the cell empty. For example a lemon yellow mix with it's own colour is not a new shade, so you'll leave the cell blank (Refer to below pic)

Colour Mix Ratio

I decided to make a 50:50 ratio of colour mix as I moved towards the right of table.

And as I move towards the bottom left of the table, I used a 30:70 ratio meaning a 30% of colour on the left rows against a 70% of colour on the top columns. i.e. 30% of Ultramarine + 70% of Carmine results in a Light Violet while a 50% of both the colour mix results in a Deep Violet.

This photo on the left may help you with the visualisation. Eventually this is how the whole colour mix charting would look like.

So the ratio depends on the type of pallet you would like to create as in a deeper or lighter shades.

To kick-start, a 50:50 ratio always does the trick and as you start charting, you well get the hang of it :)

It may sound tricky but you will appreciate as you start mastering the colour mix process.

Extending Your Colour Mixes

As you have mastered the colour mix charting, soon you will realise the need to classify your shades. You can do this by classifying your colour mixes into similar groups e.g. Blue Shades by having a variety of your Blue pigment shades or according to genre as in Warm vs Cool tones, Skin Tones and so on. It all depends on your interest and the subject of your painting.

Custom Colour Mix or Pallet

This is a scenario when you list your colour pallet on a particular painting in order to remember the specific shades used. This is helpful when you want to re-create the same painting in the future for sales or educational purposes.

In a nutshell, colour swatching, mixing and charting helps an Artists to be more organised with their work a part from the learning process. It is also cost saving as it is not necessary to grab all those variety of colours available in the market. Just a little bit of experiment with your existing pigments and Voila! you have a new shade ;)

Bonus!!

I have shared a copy of my colour charting and mixes below. They were all created in the past using Schmincke Horadam (Professional) and Schmincke Akademie (Student Grade) pigments. Hope it serves as a guideline and you're not wrong if your colour mixes varies. Trust in your learning process..

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