When you buy a new set of colored pencils or markers, what's the first thing you do?
Swatch em!
Arrange all the colors and start filling little rectangles on a chart. An hour or two later, you've mapped the entire rainbow.
It feels like you've accomplished something.
But what have you actually learned?
Ehhhhh... not as much as you think.
What Does Swatching Actually Tell Us?
A swatch is a general idea of a marker or pencil's color.
That's about it.
Experienced artists can look at a swatch and instantly see useful characteristics such as value, chroma, temperature, or undertone. But that's a learned skill, honed over years of color usage. Most hobby colorists struggle to categorize color characteristics simply by looking at a patch of color. Is this red warm or cool? can be a really hard question to answer.
But here's the thing: Even for experienced artists, the information we see in a swatch is extremely limited.
Why is that?
Well, most swatching is done on white paper, filling a small box until the color reaches its maximum intensity.
But when was the last time you colored an entire project using one pencil, leaving a large white margin around every shape?
In actual artwork, colors interact.
We layer one pencil over another. We blend markers together. We glaze, shade, soften, and deepen colors. A warm red looks completely different layered over yellow, blue, or brown.
Swatches won't tell you this.
Neighboring colors also matter, because our eyes and brain are constantly using one color to judge another. A red swatch that looks brilliant surrounded by white paper can look dull next to orange. Gray can look neutral on your swatch chart but then look oddly green or yellowish when surrounded by cool blues.
Swatches don't tell you this.
Paper matters as well. A colored pencil swatched on smooth Bristol will look completely different on textured drawing paper. Markers change color and tone depending on how the paper absorbs and distributes ink.
Swatches can't tell you this.
Your carefully organized and re-organized swatch book captures one color under one specific set of conditions. Change anything and that information no longer works.
To maintain an accurate swatch library for my own studio? I'd need separate charts for at least seven different papers.
I can't imagine spending so much time swatching when I could be coloring.
When the Swatch Isn't Even a Swatch
Online swatch charts and libraries complicate things even further.
Some manufacturer's charts and swatching websites don't give actual swatches of the art supplies. Instead, they measure the color with an instrument and use that measurement to generate a digital color sample.
Don't get me wrong, precise color measurements can be useful for web designers and digital illustrators.
But a computer-generated rectangle isn't a swatch of the pencil in your hand.
As much as I hate spending time swatching my art supplies, at least the swatches capture the sheen, luminosity, and sometimes even the depth of real in-person color.
Digital color is not real, even when it's a perfect match.
Pretty Colors Are Not Product Testing
“Box of Colors” an advanced Marker + Pencil Course by the author, Amy Shulke. More info here.
Everything I've said above is pretty important, but here's the real reason why I'm writing this article:
Search YouTube for colored pencil or marker reviews and you'll find tons of videos devoted to swatching sets. Some reviewers spend an hour or two filling in charts while the audience watches.
And manufacturers have encouraged this trend by including ready-made swatch charts in their packaging, hooray?
Uh, exactly which kind of paper did they provide?
Here's the part that really bugs me-- Once the chart is complete, the reviewer admires the pretty rainbow and recommends you buy the set now, now, now!
Based on what? A bunch’a boxes?
First, they may have spent 2 hours swatching but it was less than a minute with each color.
That's not enough time to learn much.
Even if they go slow and really pay attention, filling a box with color doesn't say much about a pencil's opacity, layering capacity, point retention, how well it sticks to the paper, or how well it sticks to other pencils. It doesn't say boo about excessive dust, crumbling lead, clumping, beading up, or plowing lines of texture through previous layers.
Kinda important, no?
And markers are a totally different ballgame. Swatching a quick square tells us nothing about ink flow, blending, staining, and what happens when you fix the fix of a fix.
The swatch reviewer showed us that every color in the set can leave a mark on paper.
That's a pretty low bar for expensive art supplies.
But here's the real crime:
Swatching requires almost no artistic skill.
Anyone can fill a little rectangle with color. You don't need to understand anything about coloring or art, even a kid can do it. And you can color a spectacular swatch chart never having touched the product before.
It's a beautiful rainbow!
But then you try coloring and it's not that easy, so you blame yourself.
Because hey, the swatches look good so it must be you, your technique, or just your general ability to screw stuff up.
We're really hard on ourselves sometimes.
The rainbow says nothing about product quality.
Testing Requires More Than Filling Boxes
Useful product testing asks specific questions and it uses consistent methods to figure out the answers.
At the Art Supply Test Lab, I use standardized procedures so that results from one brand of colored pencils can be meaningfully compared with results of another brand.
Apples to apples. Not apples to chainsaws.
For colored pencils, this includes evaluating how the pigment builds through repeated layers, how well it adheres to paper and previous layers of color, how it responds to erasure, and how the point holds up during use.
And when I test markers, I'm looking directly at the integrity of the color, how fast it builds, is it stubborn or staining, and how many layers can we apply before the color starts looking really weird.
The goal isn't a rainbow page of boxes, we're documenting how the product behaves.
The Illusion of Productivity
There's another reason I'm not enthusiastic about swatching and it has nothing to do with color comparisons or product reviews.
Swatching can accidentally become a substitute for actual coloring.
Think about what happens when someone buys a large new set of pencils or markers.
There's excitement because we've been dreaming about getting this incredible set of colors for a while now. We're finally doing it!
But there's also a lot of hesitation and uncertainty. What should I color? Which colors should I use? What if I ruin it? What if I'm not good enough to use these?
Swatching is an easy answer.
You don't have to choose a subject. You don't have to make any color decisions. There's no difficult blending, no awkward shading... all the joys of coloring without actually coloring anything.
Every box is pure success.
And when you're finished, you've got something pretty to look at. The colors are organized, the chart is impressive, and you've spent several hours doing something that's officially artistic.
It feels productive.
But filling little boxes is make-work. It doesn't teach you how to choose or use color, how to shade or highlight, or how to fix mistakes.
We develop these skills by doing actual artwork.
If you genuinely enjoy making swatch charts, that's fine. Maybe organizing colors can be a hobby in itself.
Just don't mistake artistic activity for practicing your art.
Let Lab Do the Testing
One reason I'm building the Art Supply Test Lab is to save you hours and hours, swatching every pencil, pen, and marker you own.
The Lab combines free visual color references with practical performance tests.
Instead of simply presenting a collection of pretty colors, I'm documenting how individual markers and pencils behave.
The goal is to help narrow your choices before you begin experimenting on your own.
Let's say you're working on a project and need a warm red pencil for glazing over existing layers.
A regular ol' swatch chart can help you find several reddish pencils. But it won't tell you which are transparent enough to glaze or which reds will stick to the colors you've already applied.
This is where Lab steps in.
You can look for scarlet pencils with the transparency and adhesion characteristics your project requires. Instead of experimenting with every red pencil you own, you can narrow it down to just a handful of promising candidates.
Then you test those pencils on the paper you're actually using, over the colors you're actually layering.
You're not testing every pencil just because it's red.
And once you've found the combination that works, you can get back to coloring.
Test Your Project, Not Your Collection
I know it sounds strange but I don't keep a big book of swatches.
And when I do swatch, I throw it away.
When I start a project, I use a scrap of the actual project paper to experiment with the colors and combinations I think might work best.
I'll test several colors next to one another, I spend a few minutes figuring out how each color responds to layering.
Sometimes my color choices look terrible. Sometimes an unlikely combination turns out to be perfect.
But I'm swatching to learn and I'm learning what I need to know when I need to know it.
I'm not relying on a little rectangle I colored three years ago on some other paper.
A swatch tells you what the color looks like. A test tells you how it behaves. But neither swatching nor reading test results will make you a better artist.
Growth requires practice, observation, experimentation, and the experience of making decisions while creating something.
The Art Supply Test Lab is here to provide the reference information you need to make smarter choices and spend less time on repetitive product comparisons.
Testing is my job. Coloring is yours.
P.S. But What About Inaccurate Pencil Colors?
I can already hear the objections: "But the color indicator on the pencil or marker doesn't match the actual color! That's why I need my swatch chart!"
Fair point.
But artists have been successfully using Prismacolor since 1936, and their indicators have never been a particularly accurate. And to be totally honest, I’ve been through art school, numerous post-grad art classes, plus decades of professional work and I never saw a hand colored swatch chart until I started teaching colorists. I’ve never worked from a swatch chart.
How is that possible?
There's another way to think about choosing colors, beyond the typical colorist approach.
Maybe it sounds weird, but artists generally don’t go shopping for exact colors.
It's a bigger subject than I can cover here, so I’ll be writing that article in the near future.
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I’ll update this section when I publish “Do I need an exact match?” article.
