 Hi there, my name is Sandi Olak. I'm an artist here on YouTube and welcome to the first in my series of three videos on Daniel Smith watercolors, and I'll be using the dot sample charts in this video But first my disclaimer, which is that I Invested in the paints on the left-hand side and fell in love with Daniel Smith watercolors And they provided to me the ones on the right-hand side So the opinions here are my own, but I'm really really grateful to them for sharing some paints with me So I can continue my research and study and share more information with you These are the dot charts, and these are a genius idea I have to say they have all the information about each of the colors But they also have swatches of the color. These are actual paints So you can touch a brush to them. You can see where my brush wet the paper And picked up paper and you can make your own swatch charts It helps you to be able to select what kinds of paints you might want to purchase. This has 238 in this set there's other sets as well, but the 238 was what I have and What I did something silly I took this Die set and I cut out 238 of this little hexagon. I was going to make this beautiful hexagon chart for myself and And that didn't end up necessary, but I'll show you what I did anyway So I made photocopies of the dot chart So I had these copies on white card stock They're on heavy card stock and I painted each one of those little hexagons there's actually four pages in it, so this is the other page and I adhered them on with a little bit of adhesive so that I could remove them and put them back on But literally all I did was paint each one You just touch your wet brush to the surface of the paint and paint your swatch In the back of each one of mine. I have the paint name written So I can take them all off make a selection of colors Come up with a group of colors that I think will work nice together and then put them back on my chart And it kind of keeps them all apples to apples when I'm going to be using the dot charts to paint So I liked the idea of keeping them intact instead of having a crazy Rearranged hex chart, but then I figured out well Here's an easier way if you're interested in doing it the easy way I took seven inch by half inch strips of watercolor paper And I suggest that you do this on whatever watercolor paper you normally will paint on so you get the right color and Just paint on those I glued them on to the same pieces of paper And I'm like that would have been a lot easier to do except for my system with the hexagons. I can pull those off Move them around do stuff with them and then put them back. So it depends on how you're going to use them The dot charts are printed with a bunch of information about the paints as well as this brochure has lots of information The brochure has even more information And I hope you get one of these brochures with your order when crossing my fingers that happens for you But there are a series of numbers there There's a list in the brochure of what size tube it comes in whether it comes in a stick But both the brochure and the color chart have this list that is a key So you know what all those numbers mean now that the color information there's light fastness That's how long it holds up or how well it holds up to being in the light Fugitive means that it will start to fade rapidly in the light. There's reasons for that I'll probably do a video on that at some point explaining more about that, but most of the colors are very light fast There's staining versus non staining non staining means you can lift the color and get back to nearly a white piece of paper If you apply water to it and lift color out of it Granulation is the texture and there's varying degrees of granulation for a lot of the colors and Transparency some are to semi-transparent or semi opaque and you can get all that information about each one of the colors There's also a prematex series and there's another video in this intro series That'll show you more about the prematex, but there are icons both on the brochure and on the dot chart showing you Once you do your swatching it's time to pick your favorites and I definitely Recommend doing the swatching first so you don't use up all your color before you get swatches tried out and I've decided I wanted to do some real-world testing if you're a fine artist Then do some fine art just some little mini paintings and try the colors out and see how they feel For me just looking at a swatch chart doesn't always tell me. I love this color I'm going to use this a lot, but if I use it in context it tends to tell me more so I've stamped out a card because I make greeting cards as well as do fine art and I've used a stamp set from my favorite things stamp company and stamped a bunch of images and then drew in the Boxes based on the comic strip template that is free in my store if you'd like to go and download that you can But this gave me a lot of very small areas that I could use all of the pinks the purples in the reds And I just wanted to test them see how they feel to me Just just I don't know painting in an actual real-world situation tells me a lot about what I like Some of them. I got some granulation. I went. Oh, I really like that granulation in that color a lot I like how the colors break up or You know that that pink is not one that I see myself using on a regular basis. I think there's this other pink might work better Keep a piece of paper handy Then write down notes on each of these colors and did you like them? did you not like them and What you think you might use them for because it's going to help you to prioritize what you might decide to purchase and Add to your collection because you can use these Daniel Smith watercolors in combination with watercolors You already have so you may find you only need to add a few to your collection But if you haven't watercolored at all and you just want to get started watch the other videos in this series because there's a set of six that's a great starter set and Mixes to make a ton of colors. I'll show you how that works in one of the other videos One of the other cool things that you can do with these dot charts Once you're finished with your swatching and your you're all set You could use these as a travel watercolor set If there are colors that you've purchased you can reduce the dots by just adding a dot letting it dry to make make it usable again, so you can take this on the road with you and Do your paintings from that? It's a great way to take your Daniel Smith on the road So I'm just finishing up the painting on this I'm trying to do little washes not really big ones because there's not enough color in these dots to do big washes But I'm trying to do just little ones to get the feel for these different colors looking at at the paints themselves and Trying to look at the swatches and see what I can learn about each one and which ones Do I actually want to purchase and which ones will I survive with just having a few dots to play with? So here are a few more videos the two on the left or the others in this intro series for the Daniel Smith watercolors and on the right hand side is one that will be live soon With more on Daniel Smith watercolors and using one of the charts to do a little painting You can hit the subscribe button if you're not yet subscribed to get more videos from me Thank you so much for taking some time to watch this and all the links to all the supplies and everything are in the description down below Take care