Organizational {Friday} Peerless Watercolors

Peerless Watercolors are wonderful and portable. I searched YouTube for the best way to store these beautiful watercolors but still wanted something slightly different. Also, most things I found used cardstock, and I was afraid it would just get bent up especially if I travel with this. And I must say that sometimes it pays 'not' to purge your older supplies because I had the perfect things on hand to store and use these new paints.

If you are unfamiliar with these paints, they were developed back in 1885 by Charles F. Nicholson. The formula he created 120 years ago is the formula still used today to create these colors. How cool is that? They blend beautifully and are great for travel because the color is on a small sheet of paper. The colors are acid free and non-toxic. Click here to see the products available. I purchased the Small Peerless Bonus Pak because it has 40 colors, and it's really all I need.

When the paints arrived, they came in a small clear envelope. The paints are flat sheets of dry color so it wasn't a big envelope. These sheets are a bit hard to use this way because you always have to flip through them to find the color you want. Also, the color on the sheet is very different from what the color actually looks like. And if you have any sort of dampness on your hands, you will start to lift color off of the sheets. That is why most people feel that they need to make a palette of some sort.

First, I found a great plastic box I had lying in my studio. It fits these 2" x 2" sheets perfectly. This is where I will store the original sheets, and when I need to make a new square of color for my palette, I can easily grab it from this box. But for the most part, this box will be stored in a drawer in my studio and only used for replenishing my palette.

Now let's look at the palette I created. This is where my old stash came into use. I found an old 4" x 4" clear acrylic album by Pageframe Designs in one of my cabinets. Remember those? Unfortunately, it is no longer available but Clear Scraps makes a similiar album that is available and should work perfectly for this also. Click here to see that album.

To make my palette, here is a list of supplies I used:

*Acrylic album

*1 1/2" punch square punch to make watercolor paper squares

*1" square punch to punch 1" pieces of the Peerless watercolors

*Glue dots or other adhesive

*Waterbrush

*Acetate sheets to put between your pages (the video below shows this nicely).

*Large rubberband

And here are the step-by-step instructions to create your album.

1. To create the color palette squares, punch forty 1 1/2" squares of watercolor paper.

2. Write or type each watercolor name onto each punched square.

3. Next, punch a 1" square piece of each Peerless watercolor and adhere to the appropriate 1 1/2" square made above using a Glue Dot or other adhesive.

4. Use your waterbrush to create a color sample on the side of each color palette.

5. You should then end up with 40 usable squares like this:

6. Next put them in color order. I put mine as follows: yellow, orange, green, blue, purple, pink, red, brown, black.

7. Determine how many squares you will put on each album page. For my 4x4 album, I put four squares on each acrylic page.

8. Adhere each color to the page using a Glue Dot or other adhesive. I chose to use Glue Dots because they will be easy to remove.

9. When finished, add a cover page if desired and secure album with a rubberband.

10. Store the waterbrush in the metal ring binding of the album.

Here is the finished product:

And now, here is a quick video flip-through so that you can see this album in action. I hope you enjoy it!

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you have found today's post helpful. Blessings,