Arranging a Marie's Chinese Watercolor Palette

After using the excuse that I don't paint as much as I'd like because I need to put together a wet palette before actually painting a picture (working with wet paint is the way to go), thought I would just bite the bullet and make a "dry" palette, so in the future, seeing a whole arrangement of colors already laid out would inspire me to just grab a paintbrush, a cup of water and sit down. 

I've read the debate between choosing "good" watercolors with rich pigments versus student-grade watercolors with fillers replacing pigments and think there's a lot to be said about starting with the more professional grade. Shinhan Professional Watercolors and Mission Gold Pure Pigment both are quite highly regarded as professional grade while still being reasonably priced -- wonderful! That said, I'd like to paint sometimes on Chinese scrolls which have hanji (Korean traditional handmade mulberry paper) or Chinese/Japanese rice paper, but traditional watercolors aren't designed to be painted on the thinner paper. They bleed horribly. 

According to what I've read ... and seen with Chinese watercolorist Lian Quan Zhen, Marie's Chinese watercolors have a special binder that suits them well for painting on the thinner paper. The names of colors are only written in Chinese but they do have numbers -- not sure what the numbers mean but they can at least conveniently be used for refilling the palette -- so with a 24-watercolor set, arranged and filled my first non-travel palette. 

Paints for rice and other traditional handmade papers

Before filling the 28-well palette, I washed off the residual manufacturing toxins, dried the palette and then buffed the 5 mixing wells with a scrap of sandpaper. Have seen paints don't spread well on glossy plastic so other artists have learned the trick of dealing with the problem -- rough up the plastic a bit.

Of course I arranged the colors in the palette according to my taste. Didn't use the black and at the last minute decided to go ahead and use the white ... might use it to tint a color, who knows. Didn't use one of the greens (#592 and #593 are just too similar, and wish I didn't use one of the blues as #492 and #493 are too similar as well), so that left me with 6 extra wells. Filled those with colors from ShinHan Professional, a Korean brand of watercolors; they are not Chinese watercolors with extra binder so not sure how they'll work, but thought because they extended the color range (5 of them very earthy colors), I would at least add them to the palette and use them on rice paper with caution. [A comment on Marie's 24-set: rather weak on yellows with only #218 and #242. A bit of a surprise as yellow is one of the primary colors, but the many oranges, reds, blues and greens do reflect the more stylized landscape and botanical painting style of Chinese painting.]

Be aware that Amazon markets two different boxes of Marie's watercolors x24 sets. One set has the more traditional range of Western colors (colors are also written in English), and then there are the Chinese watercolors without English and whole different range of pigments, and evidently, binders as well.

Marie's Chinese Watercolors, 24-paint set

Filled the 28 wells with 22 Chinese watercolor paints and 6 Shinhan Professional Watercolor paints

A quick study of a swan

Painted the swan using only two colors only (#495 a Prussian blue and #406 a Bordeaux) and a Micron 001 pen.
Mixed Media drawing-dessin-pastel watercolor 200 g/m paper, 5 3/4" x 8"

Made the classic mistake of beginners ... not maintaining white space to show contrast. Aw well.