HG Art Concepts Color Diary - Oils & Acrylics

If I were going to assign one painting related product as product of the year, this color diary pad would be it! Using the pages on this pad I am able to paint swatches of the colors I have in containers of watercolor paint. I have at least twenty watercolor paint containers, and it can be a challenge to remember what colors are in what box. Using this color diary pad I can flip through the pages and find exactly the color I want and determine what container it is in without opening a single container lid. That's awesome! There are multiple ways to use the box grids when you paint swatches. I like to paint a color dark, at full strength, in the top section and then in the bottom section add water to see how the color changes with additional water. This is a wonderful tool that is really going to help me keep my painting supplies in order and will serve as an incredibly valuable reference tool. The diary is 9 x 12 and has 10 pages with glassine interleaving between the pages. Each page has room for 40 swatches. I highly recommend this excellent product!

Each of the 10 swatch pages in this coilbound pad is printed on heavy paper (somewhere in the 110-140 lb range) with a canvas-like texture, and has space for 40 individual swatches. All of the sheets are removable/reinsertable/rearrangeable, and are separated by glassine sheets to help keep pages from sticking to each other or solvents from affecting neighboring pages. They're also perforated, should you really want to permanently tear them out, but...why would you? It's a convenient place to keep all of your swatches together if you decide to go back and use the same palette to create a series, or keep records of the final recipes if you're starting to make your own paints like I am.The paper, as I mentioned, is textured, about as rough as a cold-press watercolor paper, which lets paints interact with it similarly to watercolor paper and canvas; a dry brush with acrylics or oils will sit on the ridges only, while a glaze or a wet watercolor will pool in the valleys. It does a pretty decent job of emulating both, for being paper. It doesn't interact quite like a 100% cotton watercolor paper, nor like a primed canvas, but it does give a reasonable approximation. It's heavy enough to work with almost all types of paints and inks, though the texture isn't the best for inks; I prefer to swatch those on Bristol or yupo as rougher papers can make inks look quite different from smooth ones. But that's why it's called a painter's pad, not an artist's pad, right? The flap over the cover serves as a guide for how this pad is designed to be used, though (as always in the art world) it's merely a suggestion. Each individual swatch space has a solid black line to help test opacity, as well as being large enough to paint both mass tone and gradient swatches, and includes a pair of lines for writing down the recipe for that swatch (though I could get 6 lines in there if I used all the space and write really tiny). I'm happy enough with this that I'll be ordering another one of these in a few months.

Made from good materials. Beats ruling pages myself. A good way to organize colors. Have bought again and recommended to others. Just wish it was a bit cheaper.

I took a little time deciding how I wanted to organize my paint samples. I can easily spend a day in my studio making paint charts, mixing, samples, swatches, blends. I love it. When I saw this book I was thrilled, because I’m the sort of person that will scrap a whole sample page because my lines are not even. So having the sample pages already set up is my dream come true. I would use this again, in fact I’m considering buying one for each medium I work with. Nice thick pages, no bleeding through. Can handle thick swaths of paint or very wet pet. Pretty happy with this book.

I am a watercolor color collector. I have so many colors that I need to have a way to organize them visually. This swatch keeper is very easy to use and you can organize your colors easily,