Creating a Colour Selector chart

I’ve designed a system of recording both the variety of paints & drawing materials I own and the items & colours I intend to use for each project I work on. I own quite a range of media including oil-based printing inks, water colours, gouache, acrylics, alcohol inks, Inktense pencils, Graphitint pencils and the like and my new Colour Selector should make choosing the right materials for the job at hand an easy task.

Each individual media type will have it’s own chart and will be updated as I purchase new colours. I’ve started by creating the Selector for my acrylic paints.

Using 200gsm smooth surface paper – Canson Aquarelle watercolour paper – I cut my first templates.

I’ve manipulated the photo a bit so you can see the markings on the paper more easily. The idea is to record all the colours you own (acrylic paints in this example) on the long narrow strips and keep the wider piece to plan the colours you will use for a particular project. I’ve allowed for 3 projects’ colour choices per page.

I painted my swatches in colour hues and marked the back of each block with the colour name and type of paint (Structure, Flow, Atelier, etc) so I can easily locate each one. These swatches are all at 100% saturation but I’ll be creating more using thinned paints to show them semi-translucent. I’ll continue to extend the range by colour-mixing new swatches and recording the ‘recipe’ on the back of each block.

Here’s how it works.

For a project I’m currently working on I decided on grey as my base, main or primary colour – whatever you wish to call it. As paynes grey is a favourite of mine I started there and added another lighter grey from my range. These were painted onto my template before considering what to add to the range.

I picked my green strip and threaded it through the cut sections so it would slide up and down and I could check which colour I liked

Once chosen, I painted it in and continued the process and painted in the fourth colour I intend to use. Once I had completed my colour selection I recorded the names of the swatches on the template.

As can be seen from the first photograph above I left sufficient space between Selectors on the main sheet to allow for several colour choices. I like to use a reduced colour palette and rarely go above 4 or 5 colours, so they will fit on one line but if you’re making your own you can adapt it to fit more if you wish.

My next post will show some of what I’m creating with these colours.

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