Peerless Watercolor Booklet

Peerless watercolor comes in little sheets. They have pigments on the front side, and how the color would look like on the back side. They can be hard to handle since the moisture from your hand reacts with the pigments. Having a booklet is helpful to see all the colors swatches at once, access the pigments without getting your hands dirty, and to mix colors.

Even though they arrived stacked in an order with names listed on the packaging, it's important to actually play with the colors to put them in the order that would be most convenient for you to use. Note down the names on the backside before reordering the sheets, and rearrange the stack order as you play with the colors.

Once you have the order down, arrange the pieces the way you want them to be placed on the booklet. I put them into 4 rows by 5 columns on a page as it was the most compact for me, but feel free to arrange them the way you want. I wanted to make the look cleaner and look like Pantone swatches, so instead of handwriting in the color names, I created a template to print. I have the file in pdf for reference. You can edit the template if you pull it into Adobe Illustrator (I used Helvetica Neue). Each swatch is 1 in. by 1 in. that will be trimmed from the 2.5 in. by 2 in. watercolor sheets, which is plenty of pigment (you can make your booklet bigger and just fit the watercolor sheets as it but I prefered to have a smaller palette so it's easier to handle).

*You can skip this step if you're writing by hand and using the sheets in the size they came in.

Print the template on a thicker paper like cardstock so it'll withstand the moisture from watercolor swatches later. Trim the excess paper around the two pages and cut a piece of plastic sheet to the same size as a divider in between the watercolor to prevent transfers when the booklet is closed (it also act as a mixing plate too). Trim the watercolor sheets to size. You would want to trim them with pigment side down to lower the amount of color that get on your hands during the trimming process.

Put double sided tape on the backside of each sheet and stick them to their designated spot.

Tape both sides of the plastic divider to both page of the booklet. I chose white masking tape because the color is neutral so it wouldn't affect how the color swatches around it would appear to my eyes.

Tape the back of the booklet where the two pages meet to finish off the spine of the booklet.

Make swatches for each color so you can easily tell what color they'll come out to be since it's hard to tell from just the pigments. The watercolor is transparent so the names would still be legible once the watercolor dries.