Daniel Smith 'try it' dot cards for watercolour

I have been cleaning up my studio, and I found a number of dot cards that I had filed away to play with some time. These are a terrific way to try new colours and I really appreciate the companies that make them. Daniel Smith were the first, and they make a fabulous series of four sheets with 238 of their colours to try. These have been invaluable for deciding which colours to buy in full tubes. Colour charts and websites are great, but nothing beats getting a brush to the paint yourself.

I have used up a few of these sets to create the watercolour swatches found on my website, to test colour mixes and just to play :-) but with this one I painted the colours out on the chart. It can be very helpful to compare the colours side by side like this.

Daniel Smith have also created dot cards of the Primateks, a number of individual artists' palettes and other sets over the years. I've painted them out and I thought I'd post a few here as it can be hard to track them down if you are interested in finding them.

Winsor & Newton created a dot card of a few limited edition colours and QoR created a few for their watercolour launch, which I wrote about here.

Daniel Smith dot card - Jane Blundell

I am home from a fabulous trip to the US, where I met up with Urban Sketchers and SBS sketchers in San Francisco, Seattle and Mount Vernon. I spent six days in the Daniel Smith Seattle store where I had a solo exhibition of my prints, A Splash of Colour, and I had a great time doing demonstrations and workshops, not to mention wandering around exploring the many nooks and crannies of that enormous and very friendly store.

I've brought home a number of my palette Dot Cards - a great way to try new colours. It has 19 of my basic palette colours, the 20th being my custom mixed Jane's Grey.

My personal palette is a bit different from my recommended Ultimate Mixing Palette. It starts with the same 15 colours, with two slight changes, and then includes some more convenience mixtures made from these colours and some lovely deep extra colours to make a total of 20. I have explained each colour as well as the slight changes I make for my own palette in an earlier post about how I designed my palette. You can find that here.

Jane Blundell Dot Card - a nifty way to try new colours