I've had a few goes at doing colour swatches for my watercolours over the last couple of years. I think I got the idea from Jen Dixon. I was never really 100% happy with them, and they've never been particularly easy to use or refer back to, so a few months ago I started trying something a little different, to see if that would make things better. Then, life got in the way, as it does, and it never got any further than a bit more experimenting.

The other day, I spotted @wilfreeborn (who I found in an article in Artists & Illustrators magazine and who has been a massive source of inspiration since I started following him on instagram) swatching his 2018 palette on his instagram stories, and then found his post about it, and it reminded me of that thing I started to do some months ago and then never took any further.

I got my pencils and ruler out and made a bit of a chart, then went over it with my pigment fineliners, so the ink wouldn't wash away or spread when I put the paints and water over the top. I drew a bar a quarter of the way across the box so I could tell where each paint was on the opaque to transparent scale. Once I'd done that, I realised I wanted one sheet for each group of colours, and, since we had a shiny new multifunction printer, wondered if I could photocopy each sheet onto watercolour paper, so I wouldn't need to draw each one out by hand. Miraculously, it worked, and it turns out my printer comes with archival ink by default. Bonus!

My page of yellow colour swatches, surrounded by some of my watercolour palettes.

This morning, I found those photocopied sheets and decided to dig out all my paints and get started. I wrote the colour name at the top (in fancy calligraphy, because I felt like it) and set about swatching all the yellows I could find.

Then, when I was taking a picture of it to post online, I thought that if I found this useful, then others might, and so I wandered over to the computer and made a quick wee PDF.

Colour swatches PDF printed out on basic printer paper, double sided, and with one swatch on each side filled in.

Now, as I've mentioned above, I'm lucky in that I have a printer that can be fed heavier paper (up to and including 300gsm watercolour paper) and uses archival ink by default (so it doesn't go funny when I put water on it). You might not have the same, but if you're having trouble with the ink going funny when you print it, you could use the template as a guide and trace or copy from it using a pigment ink pen.

So without further ado, have at it!

If you find this useful, let me know! I can be found as @pixeldiva on instagram and twitter.