Unpopular opinion: paint swatches are boring!
Finding your own way + my unconventional paint swatching process
Artists, apparently, love to swatch paints. To fill tiny little squares with colors - mixing colors, creating gradients, making little color palettes, swatching all the shades of a particular color.
Me? I like looking at them, but the thought of actually sitting down and swatching paints bores me to tears. I’d rather sit and watch paint dry, at least there’s something to see there, to think about, to plan. But paint swatches? Nope. I’m not signing up for that, sorry!
Not that I don’t see the value in swatching paint. It’s an excellent way to see all the colors you have, to fill any color gaps, or to see how your colors mix with and complement one another so you don’t have any surprises when you sit down to paint.
The thing is, I love surprises and happy accidents when I paint. It’s how I make my most exciting discoveries and find new color combinations to fall in love with. It’s also how I found my absolute favorite shade of mud {the thing that everyone tells you to avoid when you paint; don’t listen to them, mud can be glorious!} — a beautiful, grungy brown that I mixed up by accident {smack-dab in the middle of the canvas} because I was too impatient to wait for my layers of paint to dry.
One of the reasons that this “mad scientist” approach to painting works, for me, is because I almost always paint intuitively. I’m not an illustrator and I rarely have an image of what I want to paint in mind. I just show up and let what wants to happen, happen.
The other reason why this approach works is because I work in layers. I know that any mistakes {what I call happy accidents} that I make in my first few layers can always be changed and transformed — or maybe even inform the direction that a painting will take. This helps me to take risks, experiment, and make bold moves, which fuels my continued excitement in my art practice. As a multipotentialite who can get bored and move on to the next shiny thing pretty quickly, this spontaneity has helped me stick to this art thing for over a decade.
Plus, building up the experimental muscles at the art table serves me pretty well in life, too. It makes it {relatively} easier to jump feet first into new projects {like this Substack}, course correct when needed, and know that I can always change things up as I go — and that it is a-okay to change course.
Coming back to paint swatches. Which I’ve already established, I do not do — at least not in the conventional manner.
But, I do have an unconventional method that helps me figure out how some of my paints play together. I don’t do this with each and every tube of paint. I’ve built up an intuitive understanding of how most of them work together, which has come from practice, from all the times that I took bold risks in the initial layers of a painting.
This is a method I use with the colors that I don’t particularly care for, like a tube of Liquitex Blue Gray paint that I bought recently. It looks absolutely gorgeous in the tube, but is completely different when I apply it on paper, which was such a shock that I wanted to cry the first time I used it on a painting. I salvaged that painting beautifully {if I say so myself}, but decided to swatch this particular paint in my junk journal and bring you along for the ride.
I started by putting down a layer of the paint straight from the tube, and then mixed it with a bit of white and Liquitex Parchment {which is very similar to a titanium buff}. I really like the cool grey of the paint mixed with white. I then mixed it up with a bit of Pebeo Turquoise and Camel Gray paint, to see how the Blue Gray reacts with what are essentially its base colors. The combination of Turquoise and Blue Gray is pretty delicious; it takes on a deeper shade with the gray, as I had anticipated.
With that out of the way, my next step was to see how it plays with other colors. I used a mix of colors, as you can see above — some of my current favorites along with ones that I don’t use too often, because that’s where you can make some really cool discoveries.
I think it works really well with all of these colors — the yellow and orange make a bold statement, and a happy accident was finding that gorgeous dirty yellow — a mixture of Pale Violet and Cadmium Yellow.
Now that my unconventional swatching is complete, it’s time for some painty play!
I chose to let go of some of the colors {like the green} and add in bolder layers of pink and pops of orange. I used some chalk paint over the Blue Gray paint, just to see what kind of coverage I get over this dark paint — it’s pretty good, don’t you think?
Next, I added a few bits of collage using book paper painted over with Liquitex Parchment paint, and brought in more of that dirty yellow color, a new favorite!
Some etching, a tiny bit of mark making, text stamps, scribbles, and splatters, and this page is done!
Some unconventional swatching that gets turned into a finished painting — now that I can get behind!
Consider this:
What bits of conventional wisdom related to your creative process just don’t work for you? How can you switch it up in a way that works with your personality? And how can you extend this way of thinking to your lived experience? Maybe you will turn a bit of conventional wisdom on its head, or perhaps you will simply throw it out the window!
Share your insights or a-has in the comments or simply reply to this email and let’s get this conversation rolling!
If you’re on the Substack app, consider restacking this post. Just click the little circle with arrows below and tag me so I can thank you!
"I’ve built up an intuitive understanding of how most of them work together, which has come from practice, from all the times that I took bold risks in the initial layers of a painting."
I did the 'Richard Schmid swatches' years ago as detailed in his Alla Prima book. The thing is I totally agree with you that if you just paint enough you will eventually understand how your paints work together. The swatches exercise just speeds that understanding up so instead of making the same mixing mistakes you know intuitively how to mix that particular beautiful 'grey' which has no known name. Buying a premade swatch book is practically useless to my mind - you have to do work yourself to get the understanding :)