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This post may be about watercolors, but this practice can work for any medium that requires mixing colors. I would recommend practicing in each and every medium that you enjoy using - the skill translates somewhat, but this also helps you learn how that specific medium works.

Everyone knows that practice makes perfect improvements (there’s no such thing as perfect), but part of the problem when you sit down and paint is… what should you paint? I’m about to give you an answer to that which will not only help you get to know your paints better, it’ll also help you learn how to mix colors better.

As fun as it is to purchase various convenience colors, you can achieve most of the colors you need with a limited palette. I do have a few blacks and browns in my palette these days, but they’re single pigment, and I tend to mix them with other colors to achieve certain effects. You don’t need all of the colors - in fact, I personally do not recommend buying all of them.

I see all manners of swatch charts, which I think are a great way to just get started playing with your paints. Any excuse to play with your paints and activate the creative part of your brain is a good excuse. The three practice activities I share below will not only take making paint swatches to the next level, they will do so in a way that is more relevant/memorable than picking random paints and seeing what combinations you can achieve. The final exercise will also help you figure out which colors work together in a color scheme, which can help you should you want to come up with your own limited palette for a series of work.

what i do with my swatches

There is so much more to playing with watercolors than getting the color right. I have a DIY sketchbook (photo above) with watercolor pages, which is entirely dedicated to swatches, and I record which paints/pigments I used to achieve the mix. Prior to this, I would have a large sheet that I would keep around for multiple paintings, but I realized that I wanted to have them recorded in a way that I could also keep it with me in my travel nature-journaling-urban-sketching bag for easy reference when I’m struggling to remember my favorite way to achieve a specific color. I save the mixes I don’t like in there as well, because who knows, sometimes even those can come in handy, depending on the circumstances. The swatch book also shows you how the colors appear once they are dry on the paper.

I’ll make a post in the future showing you how I made my DIY swatch book (I just need to acquire some materials for it first), but you can use anything you like. For example, Kim Crick sells stamps to make your own swatch boxes, and the cut-out cards from scrap watercolor paper can be stored in a binder with coin-collector sheets - this is just the watercolor version of my fiber swatch binder. You can purchase a pre-made watercolor journal and do it in there. You can get whole sheets of watercolor paper and store them in sheet protectors in a binder (and you can get smaller A6 six-ring binders that are more portable). Use what works for your needs. I do recommend at least using watercolor paper, if not the same type of paper that you tend to paint on (though in my case these happen to be hot press sheets though I primarily paint on cold press, but definitely stick to watercolor paper).

They don’t have to be pretty, you can scribble notes, and do what you need to do to make it make sense to you. What matters is you hold onto this, because this will be one of the most valuable resources/studies in your arsenal as an artist working with watermedia.

Color mixing practice #1

I put this activity first, because it will allow you to explore your paints, especially if you built up a palette of single pigment paints. Look up a favorite or popular convenience color, and then see if you can replicate it using the paints you already own. This is especially useful when popular convenience colors are comprised of fugitive pigments (such as Daniel Smith's moonglow).

I like to go and write down the pigments used in each brand's version of the convenience color. Their pigments are listed online, and easy to look up.

Above is an example of recreating sap green. I happened to have some of Grumbacher's Finest sap green (really old tube of paint, probably 15 years old at this point, one of my first artist grade paints, so it's possible they changed how they manufacture them since then), so I added a swatch of that for comparison, but looking at a screen should give you a general idea of what to aim for. You could also get dot cards for manufacturers without buying all the paints so you have swatches on hand. Here are a few dot cards to get you started, if you’re interested going this route: Daniel Smith’s 238 watercolor dot card, Schmincke’s 140 color dot card, Windsor & Newton’s 109 color dot card.

Sap green seems to have two primary pigments (PG7, or phthalo green, and PY150, or nickel azo yellow), and then they adjust it from there, or pick a close enough similar pigment. I don’t have PG7 currently, but I do have Amazonite which is very similar. I love crystals, so I do take the opportunity to incorporate them into my paintings when possible - this is of course a personal preference of mine. It is worth checking lightfastness though, because a few are fugitive. Most seem to be good on that.

Towards the bottom, you see that I start to move away from the standard mix and start exploring other combinations. Serpentine, another Primatek mineral paint that I love because of the separation (don’t mind my notes on granulating when I mean separation, my brain knows what my notes mean) seems like a lighter version of sap green out of the tube, so I included it there as well.

Do this with other convenience colors. You may find your own color mixes that you like better than store-bought, and you save on costs and palette space.

Mixing practice activity #2

The next type of practice that I like to do is come up with a theme and fill an entire page with every color combination I can think of to achieve those colors. I’ll also include the ones that I thought would work that didn’t work out for me - and what didn’t work could have looked okay while it was mixed, but I didn’t like the effect once it was dry. Otherwise, I’m likely to repeat that mistake, and I don’t want to repeat it on a painting. Those mixes could also end up useful for something else.

Here are some theme ideas for you to try mixing and filling a page:

• Stormy skies

• Sunrises & sunsets

• Greenery (this can be split up into spring greens, mosses, jungle greens, woodland, etc.)

• Tree bark

• Soils where you live

• Cottage garden

• Skin tones

• Sands of the world

• Rocks (grab a geology book to help you, research is useful)

• Sandstone canyons

• Painted Desert

• Animal themes (parrots, cats, dogs, horses, etc.)

• Coral reef, under the sea

• Colors of the seasons (this requires going outside throughout the year with your paints)

• Pottery

Work from both photos and real life if possible. Photos do not capture all the colors that our eyes can see. HDR photography can get fairly close to that if done properly, but a trained eye can tell if you were working from a photo or real life. By practicing from real life, you can make adjustments in your paintings that make them more realistic, if that’s what you’re aiming for.

mixing practice activity #3

You may or may not be familiar with sites which use beautiful photos to create palettes. I used them frequently when coming up with interesting color combinations or color palettes, especially when working as a graphic designer. They can also be useful for home decor, if you’re trying to figure out a color scheme for a room, so you know which paint colors to try, and how to bring the colors into the room in your linens, artwork, and various objects of interest. One of my favorites of those was Design Seeds, which unfortunately no longer exists, though you can still find their palettes on Instagram. There are tons more like it, and this link has a wonderful long list of similar sites complete with a clickable table of contents.

You can use those to get your creative juices flowing, especially if you’re struggling to get started (so in work out terms, this would be the easy version). The more challenging version of this would be to look at photos and come up with your own palettes based on them. You can even print out a photo if you like and stick it in your swatch book. I am a huge fan of Unsplash for royalty/copyright-free image sharing (so much that I’ve even contributed a few of my own), in case you need a good photo site to look for photo references for your art. You can also use your own photos for this practice, if you enjoy taking lots of pictures. Browse through images, or search whatever words come to mind, and pick a photo that inspires you. See how many colors you can match in the photo with the paints in your palette (and record which combinations you used to achieve them). To take it one step further, see if you can recreate all of the colors in the chosen photo with an extremely limited palette. You can even recreate some of the elements in the photo, to see how the colors work together and get a bit of painting practice in as well.

I recommend trying a wide variety of palettes with this - light, dark, saturated, muted, jeweled, monochrome, pastel, etc. You may find that you are drawn to one or another, and then you can challenge yourself to use that palette exclusively to paint something entirely different. Next time you are working on a painting and think “I know I’ve created that color before,” you can check back in your swatch book and see how you got there.

Even if you don’t paint any actual paintings, and only work on these practice activities consistently, I’d be willing to bet that your skills will improve noticeably. You should see a marked difference the next time you sit down to work on a painting.