Playful color swatches: A course to get to know your watercolors
In this class, you will learn to swatch your watercolor paints in order to get to know them and their properties, in a fun and playful way. I will also teach you to make a beautiful swatch page for a color palette.
Note: This class is sold for streaming class, not download.
This class is offered on a pay what you can idea. A fair price for a 2h30 long class would be 45 $CAN.
- If you need a little break, you may enter a lower price, above the minimum of 35 $CAN. If you need more of a break, please reach out.
- If you want to support me a little more, you may enter a higher price.
About the class
Learn to swatch your watercolor paints in a playful and fun way. At the end of this class, you will have:
- a better understanding of your watercolors (paints and papers),
- explored 6 different ways to swatch colors and color palettes,
- made at least one beautiful color palette page to hang in your studio,
- had lots of fun!
All of the lessons are filmed at a « paint along » speed so it truly is a hands on class where you get to paint and try all these lovely colors I know you have in your palette.
In total, you will find over 2h30 of lessons in this class to experiment and play with your watercolors.
Why should I want to swatch my watercolors?
A good way to understand your watercolor paints is to swatch them, meaning making a little card with the color painted on it so you can really see its hue as a paint, not only what is printed on the tube or pan.
That is the simplest form of swatching: the paint chip. But things can get much more interesting.
Watercolor paint properties
Watercolor paints have many properties that differ from one color to the next, depending on the pigments used and what the paint is made of, for example:
- the range of the hue,
- transparency vs opacity,
- staining properties,
- the ability to layer the color,
- the possiblity to lift the color,
- how the paint behaves in water.
I will teach you what each of these properties mean throughout this class.
Why learn about paint properties and swatch my colors?
If you want to explore all of your paints’ potential, color swatches can be done in a way to document all these properties.
But technical swatching of watercolors can become tedious. And I want to show you how to approach these swatches in a playful manner.
The color swatches we will paint together
In this class, we will try many example of color swatches so you can find your favorites:
- The simple “paintchip” swatch
- The technical swatch
- The color chart
- The palette mixing swatch
- The chaotic and playful swatch
- The wavy pattern
In this class, I will show you that there is some space for playing and creativity while learning about your colors.
You will learn different ways to swatch your colors AND have fun AND create little pieces of art along the way.
Oh! And in case you are a fellow color nerd like me, we will cover the technical swatch in one lesson, because it can be a nice reference to have in your toolkit. But if you don’t feel like exploring this, please skip the lesson.
The project
The project you will make in this class, aside from all of the little swatches in each lesson, will be a lovely reference page of swatches for a color palette of your choosing. Like in the example below.
These are a beautiful way to document color palette, play with them and find all the colors you can make while mixing your chosen colors.
To know more, you can watch either of the following videos:
- the intro to the class:
- a sample lesson, the simple color swatch:
You will learn different ways to swatch your colors AND have fun AND create little pieces of art along the way.