Getting to know your materials

Once you have chosen your medium, whether it is markers, watercolours, acrylic paint, coloured pencils, or perhaps you might be indecisive and want to play with a bit of everything and use mixed media, you’ll want to get to know your materials.

It is important to remember that there are no wrong ways to explore. Materials are there to be used. Once you have chosen your material, you will need a surface of some kind.

Now that you have decided on a material and a surface, I find that the best thing to do next is to colour swatch.

Swatching your materials is an excellent way to get familiar with the ways various things interact with each other, how well does the surface hold up, what the colours actually look like.

You’ll find that the colours or markers in particular will be quite different to the colours of the caps, some colours will dry either darker or lighter too so this is an important part of the process.

I personally have made swatch cards that I can then refer back to when choosing colours for a project. I know of one artist who swatches her materials in a sketchbook so that she can refer back to it without having lots of loose pages knocking about. How you swatch is totally up to you., but the main things is actually getting going.

If the first page of your sketchbook intimidates you, it might be a good place to do your first swatches as they can be as messy or as tidy as you feel like making them!