Having a Crafty Weekend – Glazing Chart for Altenew Watercolour Pan Set

We have a long weekend thanks to the Bank Holiday on Monday so I decided I would take some me time and spend it in the craft studio playing with some lovely supplies both old and new.  I’ve been thinking about what I was going to do exactly, and really like the idea of just going with the flow and seeing what comes up.  Lately I seem to have been chasing my tail and trying to keep up-to-date with all the birthdays etc and haven’t really been the studio without an agenda.

Last year I purchased a couple of Altenew Academy’s classes so for this weekend, I thought I might watch them again and just follow along and see what happens.  I love doing online classes, sometimes you learn something new, sometimes you don’t, sometimes you might get inspired to try different ways of doing something, and sometimes they can be used to switch your brain off or they can be used as a jumping off point for something else.  It’s also nice to watch and follow along and feel like there is someone else there crafting along with you.   So I logged in to watch and then got distracted looking at other classes lol

I might end up buying one or two this weekend, we’ll see how it goes!

Meanwhile I’ll be crafting with kittens…

One of the classes I purchased last year was the new one featuring Altenew’s Watercolor Pan Set.  Did I need a watercolour class? Yes/No – No because I’ve bee watercolouring for a while, Yes because it’s always fun to do more watercolouring, and I had recently bought the Watercolor Set so I was curious to see it used in the class and what was done with it.  One of the things I didn’t do the first time around, was a full glazing chart.  I did a little selective glazing chart but a full one for all 36 colours, I did not.  Well that’s all changed now, because as you can see from the above photo, I decided to start my Crafty Weekend by doing this first.

Two and a half hours later…

Wait, let me rewind and say that Lily heard a rumour that I was getting the paintbrushes out so she turned up to watch me paint the glazing chart.  Paintbrushes are her favourite crafty tools – she also enjoys watching other people’s watercolouring videos on Youtube lol.

So I started off finding some paper that was big enough and this is what I came up with –

This is VERY old, but I still have some free pages and although it says “sketch book” it also says it can cope with light washes, so I figured for this exercise it would be fine, and I really didn’t want to use my really good paper for this.  This book is A3 size which is double A4, and even using 1cm squares it still wasn’t big enough to fit all the 36 x 36, so I ended up using two full pages and then some pieces for the remaining colours that didn’t fit on the main pages.

At this point, Gansey was thoroughly disinterested, since math is boring lol and all I was doing at this point was marking out lines and squares.

This exercise takes up quite a bit of paper and tape since I decided to tape off the squares to keep it neat.  I didn’t have tape that was narrow enough so I ended up using double-sided tape – now this was not without its problems but I wasn’t prepared to use up expensive materials to make this, so I made do, and it worked in the end.  Also for some reason I started painting after I marked out the horizontal lines and I don’t know why I did this because it would have been easier to mark the vertical lines first and then have less to do later.  Hey ho.

And here is the first 18 colours painted out.  I left my pans in the order that they came in, so I am painting the chart in the same order, but not left to right, but instead left to right, then right to left because the colours look better that way on the chart, which you will see in a sec.

Doing it this way keeps all the greens together and then moves onto the blues and purples.

And that’s the 19-36 set of pans.

So all 36 colours are painted out but obviously once I start painting the vertical stripes, there will not be enough space to fit all 36 colours across, so I decided to keep going and fit what I could.

I could actually fit 24 colours left to right, so I marked out the squares, and then painted out the colours.  Then I marked up two other smaller pages for the remaining 12 colours, and finally it is done.

And there it is, all taped together – a full glazing chart for all 36 colours (36 x 36 = 1296) who knew you could get this many colours from just this small set!

My set is well used.  I’ve had it since last summer, and as you can see it is well used and well loved, a couple of colours in particular get heavy use, so I hope they come out with individual refill pans soon!