hello my darlings and welcome today I'd like to show you how I set up my watercolor paint palette.
Let's do some magical crafting.
I chose an artist quality brand of paint called M gram. I'll link all the art supplies in this video below if you'd like to purchase
the same ones I use I'm using 8 5 color sets in this palette the quinacridone quintet the
marine scapes set the jewel tone set the landscape set the desert Southwest set the
New England set the cityscape set and the shades of Somerset after doing some research there were
several reasons I chose this brand of paint they're created with natural gum arabic as
their only pigment medium and they're made with an edition of blackberry honey which
prevents hardening it's easy to re-wet and control these paints which helps me avoid
overworking my paper they have strong pigments that don't become muddy when mixed together M
Graham was founded in the early 1990s by two artists and they've remained a small
company by choice concentrating on producing quality watercolors they describe their entire
operation as nine folks and a part-time stray cat in a 3,000 square foot cinderblock building
surrounded by hops fields in rural Oregon Emma Graham currently offers 70 colors of watercolor
paints and most of these are single pigment tubes however I purchased 8 v tube sets trying for his
little overlapping colors as possible though I did end up with a few duplicate I unboxed all of
the tubes of paint sorting them into color order starting with yellow and removing any duplicates
next I got out an empty water color palette with half pen containers because I know that I'll be
adding some additional handmade watercolors made by artisans on Etsy to this palette later I made
sure I had a large enough palette to hold one of each of my current colors with an extra empty row
to fill later keeping the tubes in color order I filled each path pan with paint it's important
to keep the palette level while you're filling it as well as while the paint is drying in the
pans otherwise these paints might run and mix together this is especially a concern because
the honey additive keeps M gram paint softer for longer I gave my palette several days to dry you
next I measured the top panel of the pallet and trace the measurements onto a thick piece
of watercolor paper then I measured the width of one pan of water color and then traced out
the same number of circles as there are colors across and down in the palette I made sure to
leave room under each row of circles to be able to write the name of each color
keeping the tubes in color order is important as you fill the pans because you'll use the
tubes in the same color order to write the names of each color below each circle
with all the color names written out I trimmed out the color key to fit inside the palette lid
the next part of the palate creation is to paint in every circle with every
paint color I used a very wet brush and attempted to drag the paint from
the top left to the bottom right of each circle this was an attempt to show the
color from light to dark on each example I had various levels of success with this
technique but as the paint dried I could see a gradient of color in most of the circles
you you
off-camera I also painted samples of color onto eight squares of watercolor paper I decided to
Reeboks the tubes of unused paint in color order rather than in the sets they originally came in
once the swatches of color were dry and labeled I glued the square swatches on to the tops of
each box sleeve this way I will easily be able to find the colors I need now let's
take a look at all the paint swatches after they've dried remember how I cautioned you to
keep the tubes in color order while filling the pans well it looks like I got two of my colors
switched these two violets need to be whited out and re-written under the correct colors and
finally I'd like to illustrate the necessity of a color swatch sheet you can see that while some
of the colors and the pans are true to their swatches other colors differ wildly from the
pan to the paper some of the best examples of this are quinacridone red burnt sienna
and sepia and quinacridone gold I hope this video was enjoyable to watch and helpful and
informative if you're interested in setting up your own watercolor palette from scratch