Colour Swatches - Part One

I am a regular visitor to Sanketi's blog, The Storyteller  http://sanketij.blogspot.co.uk/ . She does some wonderful watercolour paintings incorporating stamping and I greatly admire her work. In fact it was Sanketi who inspired me to start going to evening classes last year to try to improve my drawing and painting skills. I am really enjoying the classes and have learnt a lot, but I am far from any good yet and have not been confident enough to include any freehand painting in my cardmaking before.

 

Online card classes are currently running a "watercolour for card makers" course and Sanketi is one of the guest tutuors. She kindly gave away one place on the course as blog candy and I was lucky enough to win it! The lessons started on Monday, with a series of videos each day showing various techniques, lots of tips and interactive aspects such as galleries and helpful forums.

 

 

Prior to the start of the course we were encouraged to get to know our watercolour supplies better by making colour swatches on watercolour paper, so that we were familiar with the actual colours. I have a lovely set of 24 Winsor and Newton Cotman watercolours that my husband bought for me a few Christmases ago and which I use at painting classes.

 

 

I used some Bockingford 140lb cold pressed watercolour paper, a round paintbrush and a fine black Faber Castell pitt artists pen to produce the colour chart below. Please click on the photos for an enlarged view if you'd like to read the names of each colour. My colour swatch chart just fits inside the lid of my paintbox, so will be just the job when I'm selecting the colours I need. 

 

I also decided to produce a colour swatch chart for my 49 Tim Holtz Distress Markers in a similar manner.

Again I used Bockingford 140lb cold pressed watercolour paper, a round paintbrush and a fine black Faber Castell pitt artists pen. Each marker was scribbled onto the paper and then I took a damp brush and added a little water to each colour, so that it's easy to see what the markers would look like when used for watercolouring.

 

I am pleased with the finished swatches and think that it was a good idea to make them, so I intend to make some more when I have time. I have some nice watercolour pencils and some twinkling H2o's, so that might be a good place to start next time. Why don't you try doing a similar thing with your supplies?!