Thursday, February 26, 2009

Watercolor Manufacture's Charts for Color Temp etc

QUESTION: Is there a list of colors(especially Daniel Smith) that show if the color are Warm or Cool, Transparent or opaque, staining or non staining. This would be so helpful. Thank You. Pam

SUSIE'S REPLY: Hi Pam!
Daniel Smith does have a printed color chart that gives you most of this information including lightfastness. While the chart doesn't list the tube colors as warm or cool it does arrange the little color swatches by their chroma starting with the cooler yellow hues moving to the warmer yellows, then the oranges and warm reds, then to the cool reds and purples, warmer blues hues then to the cooler blues before they show their earth colors.

I spoke with the nice folks at Daniel Smith today and they tell me if you call their customer service they will mail you a copy. You will need to call during business hours so you can talk to a real person. 1-800-426-7923 ( Tell them I said hello!)

The same chart can be found in their 2008-2009 reference catalog on pages 10-11. I'll try to add a link below to take you to it online. If it doesn't work go to
http://www.danielsmith.com and look for the tab for their online catalog. Here is the link: Daniel Smith Paint Chart I hope that link works.

Also....If you go to the Daniel Smith website and click on the watercolor paints you will get a colored list of paints again starting with yellow. You can click on each color and get more information about that individual color that's not included on the printed color swatch chart.

Most manufacturers (Winsor Newton, Holbein, Rembrandt, etc) have printed materials with paint information available for artists. Try doing a search for these by manufacturer's name.

Another great watercolor resource is
http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/water.html
It's got so much information it can be overwhelming.
For paints:
http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/waterfs.html
At the top of the page is a navigation bar arranged by color names.... have fun exploring!

SUSIE

No comments: