Swatches

Papers

All the swatches with watercolor technique are painted on a 300g/m² Hahnemühle Aquarell-Karton. It's a natural white, mould made, cold pressed watercolor board. All four sides are deckle-edged, and has a nice watermark in one corner. I buy 500x650 sheets, and cut them into 55x100 swatch cards.

All gouache swatches are painted on a Fabriano Bristol paper. It's a 250g/m², 100% Alpha-Cellulose, acid-free, affordable paper. From an A4 size page I can cut 3 strips.

Acrylic swatches are painted on a Daler Rowney System3 Acrylic paper. It's a 230g/m² acid-free paper with irregular linen texture with some tooth.

Watercolor swatches

If you interested, how I store my cards, you can read about that here.

Gouache swatches

I paint 5 swatches from each color. One tube color - whenever it's possible without adding water - and some lighter values (by adding white) and some darker values (by adding black).

I prepare the cards with masking tape, separating into 5 value sections. To speed up the process, I dont 'measure' just use different rulers' width. I paint the tube color slightly broader.

For gouaches I use Schminchke Akademie Gouache 100 White  PW6 for lightening and Linel Extra-Fine Gouache 269 Ivory Black  PBk9 for darkening.

For Nicker poster colors I use their own 051 White  PW6  PW4 and 054 Black  PBk1.

Gouache, especially painted straight from tube need some protection. I separate the painted swatches with a strip of glassine paper.

Acrylic swatches

For lighter and darker values I mix with Lascaux Studio 983 Tint White  PW5  PW5 or 973 Carbon Black  PBk7.

Scanning

I scan the swatches with an Epson V600 scanner in Adobe RGB. I have the settings on, to keep the texture of the scans. Along with the swatches, I also scan a small card every time, painted with Golden Neutral Gray N5. It's a middle value neutral gray, I use it to consistently set the white balance. I export the swatches from Photoshop to sRGB, where obviously we loose some color information. So the displayed colors could look different not only because of individiual screen settings, but also because of the technical limitation of the scanning workflow.