 Hi there, my name is Sandy Alnok, welcome to my YouTube channel where I'm sharing the second in my intro to Daniel Smith Watercolors series, and I'll be swatching the essential set and making some charts. But before I get started, I want to give you my disclaimer, which is that I invested in the paints on the left with Daniel Smith Watercolors and fell in love with them, and then Daniel Smith provided me with the paints on the right. I'm very grateful to them for their support of my work and the opinions that I give you, however, are mine and mine alone, even though I consult with them to get more detailed information so I can learn and share with you. This is the sets of paints that are in the Essentials set. And there are two yellows, two reds, and two blues. The cool ones are on the left, the warm ones on the right. You can intermix them, but they also each make a full range of colors on their own. And I'll show you the difference between warm and cool colors as we go. The paints are all, for the most part, very light fast. They're very transparent, except for the pure old red, which is semi opaque. They're low staining, except for the blues, which stain a little bit more. And all the properties are listed on my blog, and the link is in the description down below, as well as all the products used in this video. So you can go check that out for more information. I'll be making some color charts with each of the three, and then combining them into a single chart to see how many colors we can make. Our color wheel is going to be the first chart that we make, and you can use really, really basic supplies. And I got a very simple, I think this little palette was a dollar and a half, with just six wells in it, and put my cools on one side, my worms on the other. There's other palettes with areas to mix color in the middle, just all sorts of fancy palettes, but you can start with something really simple if you're just getting into watercolor. I've even got an 89 cent tile from my hardware store that I'm going to mix paints on. You don't have to go deep investing before you're ready to decide if you really want to get crazy with watercolor. Use whatever paper you normally are going to use for your painting. I use Arches Rough, and I have three jars of water, one for dirty water, one for less dirty, and one for really clean. So I progress as I wash my brush three times to keep my colors pure. I've used a CD and made circles, and then I cut it in quarters, and then cut that into 12 pieces altogether, and labeled the cool and the warm and wrote out the list of colors. So I remember which ones I've got in this. You can do the same process for any yellow, red, and blue set, and see how they work out in this. It doesn't have to be this particular essential set, but this is the same kind of process you would go through. So you're going to paint your colors into the triangles, and you want your red, yellow, and blue, since they are the primary colors, you want them equidistant from each other. So I'm going to speed this up in a second here, so we don't have to get bored watching me do a little teeny tiny coloring. But you can see as this develops the difference between the cool on the top and the warm on the bottom. So those are all equidistant from each other, and what we're going to do now is combine colors to make the center one. So the yellow and the red make orange, and that's going to be in the middle between them. And we're going to do the same thing. The red and the blue make a brun of a violet. Now, some of them that went on the bottom right didn't come out looking really purple. Each one of the shades that you make, and now when you start mixing the tertiary colors, you're going to mix your orange and your yellow in order to make a yellow orange, and your orange and your red to make a red orange. Depending on how much you put of each of those colors in there, these shades may come out slightly different. There's no science to it unless you're really good at knowing, okay, I filled the brush with one load of this paint and one load of that paint to try to equal them out, but make it as good as you can, and this will still teach you a lot. You can see the variety of colors that you can get from mixing some of these together. Now, one of the things that you'll see me doing here is washing my brush three times, but look at this one. This tells you that if you put all colors into one, you get brown. So if you ever need a brown color, mix your yellow, red, and blue, and now we're going to look at some color possibilities. The chart we're going to make now is going to show us just how many colors we can make out of some simple color mixing. I've got a piece of nine by nine, and I have a grid that I drew on it with pencil with seven boxes across and seven down since I have six paints, and I'm going to go over my lines of these one by one inch boxes with some masking fluid. There's a lot of different types of masking fluid. You can use whatever you'd like, but I found that the masking fluid helped to keep me from bleeding into each other. The first time I did the chart, I wasn't patient. I'm never patient and waiting for my paint to dry and everything bled together, so this is just going to make sure that I have wells to drop each of my colors into so I don't have a big mess with color bleeding everywhere. Here's the finished one, ready to start painting, and I will write across the top all of the colors and then down the side the same list of colors and you'll see how that plays out. I'll have a download as well for you on my blog of this chart so you can print it out as a reference for yourself and then draw your own and write your own names of your own paints on it, whatever ones you want to graph out. So I'm going to start by doing the real easy part. The easy part is just straightforward color and I'm going to do the top and the bottom or the top and the left and then where they crisscross, it's going to be the same color, except you technically it would be two coats of it so you can have one coat and two coats in those boxes. Throughout this process, I didn't double coat the ones that were just straightforward colors. I just focused on the mixing of colors that we'll get to in just a few minutes. But I will speed this up so we can get through this process. What this chart does, and I was really delighted that I figured out how Daniel Smith had done it because I saw this chart on their website and I was like, that's really cool, how did they make that? And what colors did they, you know, how did they mix the colors and how did they come up with the system? And I started doing this now for a couple other groups of colors and this chart is actually really helpful in telling you what those colors look like when you try to mix them together. And it was a real challenge for me in trying to mix colors and if you haven't mixed paint before, this is a really good exercise to go through and I'll explain as we get there. Right now I'm just going straightforward colors, whatever the paints are that I'm going to use, the six paints in those boxes on the outside and then where they meet in the graph, then that's the same color. So this is the easy part and then we'll get to the hard color mixing part. There's a little brain work that you have to do to figure it out. So I'm going to need a yellow that has a lot more of the Hansa yellow and a little bit of the new Gamboge and then I need a yellow that's more of the new Gamboge but a little bit of the Hansa yellow. So it gives you another variety. You could just say I'm going to mix half and half of both but on a chart like this, if you look at the column going down, then that's going to be focused on like that, where I'm painting right now, that's the column going across actually. So that one has more of the new Gamboge than it does the Hansa yellow. So you can see that's a darker color. When I do the one going the other direction, I'm going to focus on the Hansa yellow. So that's what happens when you take the Hansa yellow and you add just a little bit of the new Gamboge. So you can see you get a second color of that yellow-orange color just by varying the amount of each of the other colors that you put into it. So what I figured out was I put a bigger splotch of the Hansa yellow and then a little splotch of the Hansa yellow and then in the big splotch, I put a little bit of the other color and in the little splotch, I put a big splotch of the other color. Not sure if that's making sense. Not sure if I'm explaining it right but hopefully by the time you watch this whole chart, you may get the hang of how I did this. This is not a required thing at all for you to do with your paints. It's a really good exercise but you can paint and mix your paints in all kinds of ways but what it showed me was when I'm mixing a purple, I can vary the amount of red in it and the amount of blue in it and completely change it. And there are some colors when I combine them like that green down in the bottom got really bright because I used a lot of the Hansa yellow and a little bit of that blue but you can also turn it around. You can add a different percentage of one or the other and get a huge variety, just a huge, huge variety from just six paints. It's pretty amazing that you get this kind of intensity. I've also seen glazing charts and I'll link you to a glazing chart in the description down below from a watercolorist that I really like. She'll show you exactly how to make a glazing chart but what I found was that you'll get fewer colors when you're actually mixing them than if you're glazing and glazing is just when you layer colors over top of each other. At the end of this video, I will have a link for you to another video in which I did a painting and used this chart to select my colors because this will help you to figure out which colors mix best to get the kind of orange or the kind of green that you're looking for. I'm using an adhesive pickup to remove the masking fluid. You can do it with your fingers but I find that that sometimes gets grease onto the surface of the paper and I also recommend waiting till it's completely, completely dry. You don't wanna peel off your paint or anything. Do any damage to the surface of the paper because if it's wet, that will happen. You can see that upper left came off really nice and cleanly and then I'm gonna mount this on some heavy cardboard so it'll last. On the left is video number one in this series. In the center is video number three and the one on the right hand side is a painting that I referred to earlier using the chart that we just made. And you're welcome to click on any of those. You can hit the subscribe button to get more from me. You can click on the links in the doobly-doo to get more information on the products used here. And I will see you in another video. Take care and happy painting.