 Well, hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok, and today I'm going to talk about expanding the mixing palette. And I'm going to start by using Prussian Blue as a guinea pig and testing it with a whole bunch of watercolors to see what it works with. When I've bought a new tube of watercolor, I have not done the testing that I would like to have done with it. So what I'm going to be doing this year is taking practice paintings like that one, turning it over on the back and doing some testing. The preliminary color testing I'm going to do regardless of what other testing I do, because this preliminary one is with the Daniel Smith Essential Set, which has a warm red, a warm yellow, and a warm blue in it. And it's going to tell me a lot about what I want to test with later. And we'll talk about that more later on in this video. And I only need to test it with two colors, so I've made an X if you're testing with three colors, then you can make an asterisk or something or just make blobs and test each one of the colors in this set because it's going to tell me whether I want to explore more of the warm yellows because I like the kind of green that makes. Do I want to explore warm reds because they're going to lean more toward a neutral? Am I looking for a purple color? Do I want to look for all of the cooler reds that I have and what kinds of purples that they're going to make? And all those decisions can be started by testing just a basic warm and a cool with the color that you're testing. Be sure to tip or bend your paper while you're doing this as well and see if you can make the colors blend in different ways and what's going to happen when they do. Now, before I get to the testing, I want to talk about my insane paint collection. This is ridiculous. No one needs this. I'm just going to tell you that right off the bat. When I first got into watercolor, I didn't have any idea what I was doing. And Daniel Smith, wonderful, wonderful people there, since they heard that I was going to get started on this, they hooked me up with a bunch of these, not all of these because I have bought an insane amount myself, but they hooked me up with a bunch of the five mill tubes and that's what a lot of these are. And I put them in pallets at the time in orders that I thought made sense. I wasn't thinking I was going to add more colors. So I ended up with my greens and my purples mixed in with my neutrals and then the reds. I didn't have enough space in the place where I started putting the reds. So they morphed over into with being stored with the grays, et cetera, and it was ridiculous. So I haven't used all of those because it was such a mess. So I recently went through and cleaned everything out. The palette I was just digging on is my main palette that I've used for about a year. It's filthy dirty and I had to actually really carve the pans out of there. It was really bad. But I went through all of these. I pulled out all of the colors. I put them in order so that now my yellows will be with my yellows and my reds will be with my reds. I took off the old key sheets. I made new ones. This is my new main palette and I've committed that I'm going to keep my main palette, my main palette for crafting for two years so that you don't feel like you have to go out and buy all the colors all the time. So this is the one, same colors as it has been, just a different palette, a fancy Italian one this time. So now let's talk about color testing, which is what you're here for. And I have tried to find a pretty way to do color testing. Usually I just do blobs. But since I wanted to now systematically use all these colors I have in all of these pans, it's ridiculous to have them and not play around with them. I've invented this little thing I call the beetle. And I put a big blob of wet paint down, keep it wet so that you don't end up trying to mix with dry paint by the time you're done with the exercise. But I'm just going through a bunch of the different colors that I have. I'm not testing everything. But I know that there's certain colors that I want to test because I love them. The nickel, azo, the azo and the Indian yellow all have similar properties. So I wanted to see if any of them does something different. And I'm going to do a bunch of the warm yellows. And then I'm going to move into my cool yellows. Each one of them is going to act different, mix a different green. The colors, the pigments, sometimes the yellow moves into the blue. And sometimes the blue moves into the yellow. All of those properties are interesting to know about. And unless you paint them out yourself, it's hard to know what they'll be. Now you're not going to have this ridiculous number of colors. I'm just going to say that. Nobody needs that. Don't even take this video as a statement that you should have it. However, whatever colors you do have, test them. I'm going to go through it and I'm going to test the same way with my palette. I want to see how that Prussian blue works with all the colors I already use all the time. You can test them with other brands. Test them in a bunch of different ways. But if you do this, it's going to teach you a lot about how the colors move and what they mix to be when you put them together. But make sure you work quickly. A tip I have, I ended up talking to myself while I was filming this so that when I was finished, I could go back to the audio of that and write down which colors they were. So I spoke out loud to myself that, yes, I'm going to use Opera Pink. And now I know that this first one that I was using was Opera Pink. And when it was all dried, I could mark that on my sheet because it wouldn't do any good to do all this testing and not have any idea what the colors were. Well, you're not going to likely be filming a video while you're making a beetle or whatever blobs of color. So do yourself a favor and say, OK, I'm going to just get my phone out and I'm going to record myself. And it's just for your own edification. Comment to yourself on what color you used and ooh, I liked what it did there. Ooh, look at how that color moved into that other color. Oh, I hated that one. And that's going to give you notes that you can put down on your test sheet later when it's dry. But you want to do this quickly while it's wet and doing it by audio, just talking to yourself while you're doing it, is going to help to keep those notes handy without having to try to stop and write things down because the paint on the right hand side is going to dry by the time you get finished with writing down everything for the colors on the left hand side. Another tip for you in doing this kind of testing is to do a giant blob like this in whatever shape you make it, because then you only have to rinse the brush in between each of your reds. Otherwise, you'd have to make a blue blob, rinse it, make a red blob, rinse it, etc. You could alternatively have one brush that you have ready for your blues and not rinse it at all and then just change out the reds in the brush that you're using for the color you're testing it with. But in general, anyone who knows me knows that I'm not big on swatching for swatching sake. So what I'm going to be doing with these tests is starting to paint with them. And I want to try to do some paintings where I test to see what does a certain combination look like when I paint a building with it or paint a tree with it in context, instead of just in a blob on a sheet of paper like this, because this doesn't tell me much about how it's going to perform on an actual painting. If you'd like to see how all these colors dried and which color is which, because I have them all labeled, they're over on my blog, so you can go check that out at SandyAllKnock.com. Link is in the doobly-doo down below. And if you would like to do a much simpler way of playing with colors and testing them out and also getting a card made at the same time, then go over to Ellen Hutts since channel where I have a video over there today. And that's about it for me. I will see you soon with more videos using Prussian Blue and testing out some of these colors in reality. Take care. Thanks. Bye-bye.