In case my absence hasn’t made it obvious, I’m struggling at the moment. My head is not a happy place right now and my son has just gone back to his grandmothers after the summer holidays. I miss him. It’s lonely here after 6 weeks with his constant company.
My husband took him on the coash (no car!) yesterday so I decided to finally sort out a final, expandable version of the Big Book Of Colour (BBoC) for my pencils. This is the third version because I keep adding to the collection and the book isn’t big enough to hold everything anymore. Also, I want to record the colours in their brand groups as well as in their colour groups.
There are many swatch books/colour charts available online but they all either have space for colouring but not for colour names or are for ‘grown-up’ pencils and I don’t have any of those so I had to make my own. I used an Open Office document to create a simple table with squares for colour and space for colour names and numbers beneath. As I’ve said before, I flit between crafts which means I have a lot of things that can be repurposed and this time was no different. I knew I had an A5 folder on a shelf and was preparing to cut some printer paper down to size when I found some A5 sized card and A5 plastic sleeves, which was perfect because pens won’t bleed through card and watercolours won’t warp it either.
Print your own blank pencil swatch chart – A5. Check that your printer is set for A5 sized paper (half an A4 page) and that your borders are at 1.50cm for top, left and right and at 1.3cm for the bottom. You can also print this 2 to a page.
It took me about a day to finish but with a total of 492 colours (336 coloured pencils, 83 watercolour pencils and 73 markers & pens), it was a big job (set up the printer, print 50 double sided pages, sort pencils that aren’t already sorted, label and colour as appropriate).
This is the third version of the BBoC I have made but because this one is expandable and easily added to, I am unlikely to need to make another version.
I have pages for each of the brands/lines that I have and will be making a section for the coloured pencils that shows the colour groups. When I have more watercolours and more pens/markers, I will do sections for them too.
I’m also going to make laminated, oversized pages as dividers but I want to make them pretty so they won’t be done quickly.
And of course, I hadn’t finished this post before my husband got home so I get to tell you how awesome he is – he brought home a set of 12 Inktense watercolours and 24 Polychromos. So very very delighted! I have a few Inktense already but there are only 2 repeats so I now have 16 individual colours. And Polychromos… sooooo beautiful! They are my first set of proper ‘grown-up’ colouring pencils and they are even more gorgeous to use than I thought they would be.
There is a lot of hype about Prismacolours and Polychromos, and there are many of each but they are also prohibitively expensive. And you know what? I love my Crayola pencils so as much as I wanted to try the fancy pencils (and they are fancy) I was ok to wait for them. But now I don’t have to!
I am very very spoiled. My husband will say I am very very loved. He’s awesome and I love him regardless of the fancy pencils.
knit1breathe1 