November 28, 2024

Mini Pans; Many Paints

Lisa Spangler shares her newest Folio Palette, dedicated to the exploration of color and perfect for capturing botanical observations wherever she goes.

By Lisa Spangler

A watercolor paint palette with various bright colors sits open next to a sheet of paper displaying a color swatch grid and a paintbrush resting on it. The setting features textured wooden surfaces.

Hi friends! If you know me, you’ll know that I absolutely love exploring color—from nerding out over pigments and fiddling with my palettes to changing them up with the seasons and the locations where I’m painting. I set up this palette as a way to play with color and to use up all the tubes of paints I had sitting in a drawer.

Palette Colors

All of my paints are Daniel Smith unless specified otherwise: H = Holbein, WN=Winsor and Newton, LS = Letter Sparrow. They are listed by row and column, clockwise starting at the top left corner.

A watercolor palette displaying a variety of colors, with vibrant yellows, reds, greens, and browns arranged in a grid pattern. Some sections show mixed paint, while others are clean and intact.

Top row: Azo Yellow (PY151), Hansa Yellow Medium (PY97), Permanent Yellow Deep (PY110), Quinacridone Coral (PR209), Quinacridone Rose (PV19), Quinacridone Magenta (PR122, WN), Potter’s Pink (PR233), Organic Vermillion (PR188), Pyrrol Red (PR254), Quinacridone Burnt Scarlet

Right side: Deep Scarlet (PR175), Venetian Red (PR101), Transparent Red Oxide (PR101), Piemontite Genuine, Indigo (PB60, PBk6)

Bottom row: Bloodstone Genuine, Vivianite (Blue Ochre, LS), Van Dyck Brown (PBr7), French Ultramarine Blue (PB29, WN), Smalt (PB15, WN), Phthalo Blue (Green Shade, PG7), Chromium Oxide Green (PG17), Peacock Blue (PB15 + PG7, H), Cobalt Turquoise Light (PG50, WN)

Left side: Chinese white (PW4), Yellow Ochre (PY42, H), Raw Umber (PBr7, WN), Nickel Azo Yellow (PY150)

Do I need this many colors? Heck, no! I’m perfectly content with a limited palette, and that’s what I use most of the time. Do I love having this many colors? Heck, yeah! It feels like a decadent luxury :)

A brown leather notebook and a green fabric pouch resting on a stone surface, with snow and blurred landscape in the background.

I mainly use this Sketcher Fest Folio Palette in my perpetual journal for botanical studies. As soon as I saw this green palette, I just had to have it go along with the botanical theme and match the Duotone Forest Pocket Art Toolkit (which we hope to restock soon)!

A picnic table beside a fire pit in a grassy area, with patches of snow and rocky mountains in the background under a clear blue sky.
Cheyenne Mountain State Park in Colorado.
Lisa’s perpetual journal, Toolkit, water cup, and brush roll.

My perpetual journal is handmade by Lindsey Mears and has Fabriano Artistico 100% cotton hot press watercolor paper. I hope to use it for 5-7 years. Plus it’s been an awesome way to document all the cool plants I find on our travels in the van. I had kept one before for three years using two Hahnemühle 100% cotton sketchbooks—one isn’t enough to cover all 52 weeks in a year. These journals are expensive up front but, with the perpetual journal format, it will last many, many years. I’m looking forward to filling it up with all the cool plants I find while traveling full time in our van!

Watercolor illustrations of various plants, including blueberries and a drawing of bearberry with notes about their identification and dates written in the margins. The background shows a textured surface.
Camp collage of juniper berries, pussytoes, and bearberries.
A watercolor illustration of a brownish-yellow leaf on white paper, with handwritten text below the leaf that reads "10.10.2024" and additional notes about its origin.
Cottonwood leaf sketch.
Two vibrant yellow flowers with dark centers are painted on a white background. Handwritten notes beside the flowers indicate the date and location, mentioning a hike in Hidden Valley.
Brown-eyed Susans.
A watercolor painting features a blue flower with a yellow center and green foliage. Handwritten notes describe the flower as Linum lewisii, spotted while hiking at Valley Caldera on August 21, 2014. There are small colorful dots nearby.
Blue Flax flower.

About the Palette

This Folio Palette has a rainbow of colors in 28 (!) Mini Pans and two XL Mixing Pans. I dedicate one to mixing greens and the other to neutrals — think browns, grays, and darks. I never clean these out, as I find having a little extra color in your mix makes them more lively and realistic. I use the lid for mixing all the rest.

Cheat Sheets

With this many colors, I’ve found that I have to have cheat sheets to know what’s what! This is something I don’t have to do with my limited palettes. Check out a swatch video on Instagram to can see all those glorious colors!

I trimmed a piece of Arches cold press paper to form a mini booklet, swatched the colors on the first page, and labeled them.

A hand holds a color swatch featuring various shades of green and brown paint. The background shows a blurred landscape with trees and a mountainous horizon under clear blue skies.
Lisa’s “cheat sheet” shows her go-to green and neutral mixes.

Then, I made cheat sheets for my go-to green and neutral mixes on the inner two pages.

A color swatch card featuring various shades of green watercolors, labeled with their pigment information. The background shows a watercolor palette with vibrant colors, including greens and yellows.
“Cheat sheet” of green mixes.
A watercolor illustration of a green plant with delicate leaves and a yellow flower. Handwritten notes include "I brought me one seed viper," along with "Capitan Mountain, New Mexico" and the date "7-19-2024."
Juniper sketch from New Mexico.

My favorite green mixes are:

  • Phthalo Green + Permanent Yellow Deep = a beautiful sap green

  • Cobalt Turquoise Light + Venetian Red = the perfect opaque blue-green for cacti, agaves, and yuccas

  • Phthalo Green + Transparent Red Oxide = pine green (add a little indigo to turn it more of a perylene green color

  • Chromium Green Oxide + Phthalo Green = a rich, granulating green

  • Chromium Green Oxide + any yellow = a granulating sap green

A textured watercolor paper showcasing a range of neutral colors, with labeled swatches including grays, browns, and yellows, alongside some vibrant hues.
“Cheat sheet” of neutral mixes.
A watercolor illustration of a brownish-yellow leaf on white paper, with handwritten text below the leaf that reads "10.10.2024" and additional notes about its origin.
Cottonwood leaf sketch from Colorado.

My favorite neutral mixes are:

Pocket Art Toolkit

An open green art supply case revealing various pens and markers in the pockets, alongside a watercolor palette and a color swatch on a wooden surface.
Lisa’s current Pocket Art Toolkit set-up.

My palette lives in a Duotone Forest Pocket Art Toolkit, along with the rest of the pens I use in my perpetual journal, including:

  • A Pentel Aquash Waterbrush with a fine point and a pipette for filling it with water

  • Kakimori mechanical pencil filled with fine 2mm lead (the sharpener is in one of the pockets on the right)

  • Copic multiliner SPs in sizes 0.1, 0.03, and 0.05 — I love that these are refillable, including changing out the nibs!

  • 2 mini binder clips and a shop towel

An open sketchbook rests on a tree stump, displaying watercolor illustrations of various plants and flowers. A palette with vibrant paints and a pen are placed beside the sketchbook, with greenery in the background.

I hope this sparks you to build your own palette to explore colors!
~ Lisa


All photos courtesy of Lisa Spangler.
An artist sites on a rock, dipping a paintbrush in a Pocket Palette.

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