Peerless Transparent Paints

I feel I must share an amazing discovery on the old internet, Nicholson's Peerless Transparent Watercolour Paints. If that sounds like an old fashioned patent product that is because they are!

 

Peerless paints are manufactured in the US, and have been since 1885 when they were developed to hand tint photographs. The unique thing about these paints is they are coated onto the surface of a special paper and then activated when water is added. They are dye based, really transparent colours. I saw them when I was googling storage of watercolour paper and came across this film on YouTube by Jayne Davenport. They are really thin sheets of paint which makes them incredibly portable. Now as soon as my paints arrived, inspired by Jayne,  I had to get my own portable palette oragnised. I warn you now some may find this post a bit dull, while others may get as excited as me by such a task! 

First I did some test swatches on scrap paper to work out colour groupings, that got me really excited by the colour intensity. I then designed a grid with an inch square for the paint itself and space underneath for a strip of watercolour paper for a test paint splodge and the name of the colour. This shows the format for the blank pages printed on white card with the watercolour paper strips added. The final page has an index of which paint colours come from each set of paints as various options are available.

 

I gradually painted my colours onto each strip of paper and I also cut out some inch square samples.

 



I used masking tape to organise my paint squares onto a spare grid printed onto paper. As I cut the inch squares out I wrote the colour name onto the masking tape and added a square of red line tape on the back of each ready for mounting. Now this is a little bit of a mucky job as the paint does activate on your hands if you have hot hands as most of us have recently!

When all the swatches had been painted on, the next stage was for me to trim up the grids and laminate the panels. I had left the excess edges in situ while I did the painting and that worked well as my mucky fingers were only touching something that would be waste when trimmed off. Once laminated and trimmed, I used some A3 kraft card to make a four fold palette. Between each of the sets of two I used acetate as Jayne had to separate colours if wet and also providing a mobile palette for mixing paints.

 

Once I had stuck down my four grids, two with a hinged acetate panel underneath, I was ready to stick on my paint squares.

 





The end result is my lovely palette of all the gorgeous colours. I can imagine taking this on holiday and to all sorts of places, with just a waterbrush these paints are good to go. I want to make a decorate folder to house the palette, but in the meantime, I can just delight in the result of my work of about three evenings!!! Please excuse the messy desk, but you know how it is.

I bought my paints here and I cannot recommend the customer service and speedy delivery I received highly enough.

I hope someone out there will enjoy this post!!! Thank you to Jayne for the inspiration.

The cooler air this evening is a delight, we have had no rain down here yet though, I think some other may have had our share!

Let me leave you with a pic I took outside our front door. This little plant seems to hang on by a thread, but never grows very much. I noticed this week, something had been making holes in the leaf and the little muncher seems quite artistic, because they have created a leafy butterfly with holes in each corner!

Elaine