Hello, it's Otakana here. Today I want to share with you my 5 tips on how to put together your own transparent watercolor palette. Before I get started, I want to apologize for my voice. I am just starting to recover from a bronchitis that had me bed ridden for 10 days, so it's still a bit rough around the edges. I'm hoping it will come back to me very soon, but thank you for your patience in the meantime. Let's get started with the transparent watercolor palette. When you're starting out with watercolor, I don't think it's necessary for you to worry about transparent and opaque paints. However, if you have been doing watercolor painting for a while, you probably started getting into trying out different techniques and some techniques, such as using lots of layers, can struggle if you are using colors of different opacity. For example, here's a piece I painted with three transparent colors. You can see all the lovely layers and details underneath. The colors also mix beautifully with each other. Here's another piece using the same layering technique but with one transparent and two opaque colors. Opate colors not only obscure the layers underneath, but it also lifts much easier. This means when you put a new layer of paint down, the previous layer likes to re-wet fast and mix with the new layer resulting in muddy colors. So if you are interested in using techniques that require transparent paints, it's the perfect time for you to put together your transparent watercolor palette and I have some tips for you. Tip number one, know what you want. Before we even take a look at yummy paints, we have to decide on what you want from your palette. Do you want an all-rounder palette or one for landscape, animals or perhaps portraits? What you are going to use the palette for will influence what colors you should have in your palette. For my own palette, I want an all-rounder that has all the colors of the color wheel plus some extra colors I've come to really love. I also want them to be super transparent colors just so that I don't end up making a mess again. Tip number two, brand matter. Here I don't mean the more expensive of brand the better it's going to be. What I mean is even if the paints have the same name with the same pigment, the processing method each brand uses can hugely affect its opacity. For example, if we take Naples Yellow, how wide classifies theirs as transparent? Daniel Smith classifies it as semi-transparent? Core, which is made by Golden, classifies theirs as semi-o-pake and when they're new to Shemenghe and Sinelia, all classified their Naples Yellow as opaque. It's a bit of a mix bag, so it is important that when you see recommendations for transparent or pig paints, you need to also find out the brand they are referring to. Tip number three, test, test, test. Following on from thinking about brands, another thing to know is, in my experience, the transparency opacity rating the brands give you don't seem all that accurate. They don't seem to be an industry standard for classifying the opacity of a paint, so each brand just do their own thing. And even within brands, they don't seem all that consistent a lot of the time. On top of that, we all have our own sense of what is transparent and what is not. Testing transparency is very easy. You draw a black sharpie line on some watercolor paper. Then you swatch each color and let it dry. Once dry, if the black line under the paint seems pretty much the same as before, then the paint is transparent. If the black line looks lighter and you can see the pigments on top of the lines, then the paint has some opacity to it. Tip number four, start with the Queen Acudones and Thalos. Having said each brand is different, on the whole, Queen Acudones and Thalos tend to be good transparent water colors. The Queen Acudone colors can start from orange to red to beautiful pinks through to purples. The Thalos colors will cover you from blues to turquoise to greens. So from just these two kinds of paints, you will get 90% of your color palette sorted. That's great coverage! It just leaves you to find your favourite transparent yellows, violets and yellow greens. One thing to note though is that Queen Acudones and Thalos colors are really intensely bright. This is perfect for what I'm looking for, but if you're looking for more muted palette, such as for landscapes, you will probably want to avoid these. Tip number five, if two colors are close, test by colour mixing and try nail techniques. If you are a paint holder like me, you will probably have multiple colors that are very similar. Some people might want all the possible colors to be in their palette, but I like to keep my palette as streamlined as possible. However, it can be really hard to pick between two beautiful colors. One way I deal with this admittedly pleasurable difficulty is to mix the two colors with other colors you know you want to have in the palette and frequently mix with. For example, I couldn't decide between Indigo and Antwerp Blue. They kind of serve the same function in my palette, so I didn't really want to have both. So I mixed the two colors with Queen Acudone Gold and Queen Acudone Rose. It turned out that when mixed with Queen Acudone Gold Antwerp Blue makes a much nicer brighter green than Indigo does. Another thing I want to make sure was that for all the colors I selected from the colour wheel, there was a colour that was its true complement. That is to say that two colors will grey out properly. So even though Ultramanian Violet and Ultraman Blue aren't super duper transparent, I decided to have them in my palette as they neutralise perfectly with my permanent yellow light and permanent yellow orange. This is where knowing what you want your palette to do comes in really handy. Similarly, if you have particular techniques you know you want to use a lot with the palette, it's good to test the technique on the colors. You may find that the technique works much better on one colour than the other. For example, I knew I wanted to be able to make blooms in a paint by dropping water onto them, so I tested the blooming technique with two pairs of colors I wasn't sure of to make certain that they were all bloomed nicely with water. I will be uploading a video of the transparent water colour palette I put together in the next day or so, so you can watch me fill my palette and colour swatch all the paints. I'll be sure to include the brands of each paint for you. Now that you have all five of my tips in putting together your transparent water colour palette, I hope you have lots of fun picking what colour to have in your palette. If you have any questions about putting together your transparent palette, please ask away in the comment. Thank you so much for watching, please like, comment and subscribe and I will see you in the next video.