Watercolour Painting and Colour Charts ...

 Prior to the SBA Distance Course I have only worked with a limited watercolour palette of six colours .... Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Lemon, Cerulean Blue, French Ultramarine, Cadmium Red and Permanent Rose.

 The first watercolour painting I ever did was to complete a set of colour charts using only these six pigments - and blending them to produce colour variations.  You can see the colours on each side of the page before gradually mixing them to provide different hues.

I also diluted these blends which shows in the small boxes underneath indicating when more water was added and the resulting paler shades.

   I ended up with over 400 versions of these colours from only six - it  taught me a lot about colour mixing and the water to pigment ratios.

Working on the third assignment for the SBA Distance Course - a page of leaves - meant I had to learn more about colour - specifically greens.  With  advice and suggestions from the Botanical Artists Forum I bought a few more tubes to add to my collection of paints. I started mixing the colours again to see how many greens I would have available and how the colours interacted with each other.   I found it so helpful  to become familiar with the colours and these charts are now a constant source of reference.

Playing with mixing greens ...