What the Hell Is a Swatch?
October 28, 2025
På SvenskaIf you’re interested in watercolor painting and start looking for information on YouTube, chances are you’ll come across someone carefully painting watercolor in small squares. As far as I know, there’s no real term for this in Swedish — Färgprover (color samples) might be the closest. In English, it’s called a swatch, and it has puzzled me for quite some time.
Using a color chart — a sheet showing the paints in your palette — is nothing new. But a swatch is something else entirely. It’s a way of collecting small color samples and archiving them in plastic sleeves, binders, or notebooks.
There’s an entire industry built around it. So many people spend their time making swatches that there’s now a market for templates, stamps (with or without ink pads), printed grids, and stencils. When so many companies can profit from selling swatching tools, tens of thousands of people must be doing it.
A simple swatch might consist of a few painted squares or circles on a sheet of paper. There are stencils designed specifically for creating these grids. A more elaborate swatch includes several sections meant to show different characteristics of a paint: full strength, gradation, lifting, and transparency. There are even stamps and stencils that provide pre-drawn boxes for all of these tests.
Some templates come with preprinted information boxes for filling in details about transparency, lightfastness, lifting, granulation, and pigment composition. I assume these details are taken from the manufacturer — whose claims are, of course, always trustworthy. A serious artist, however, will test these things personally, even if lightfastness takes a very long time to evaluate.
Once you’ve spent hours — with great patience and precision — creating all those color samples, the big question remains: what are they for? Are they meant to serve as a kind of reference library for your paints? Should you look up French ultramarine before using it — and does the swatch actually give you the information you need to use the color properly?
Perhaps the most honest comment came from a YouTuber who said, “The most fun part is organizing my swatches in binders — I just love organizing.” And maybe that’s the real secret behind the swatch’s popularity: it awakens the inner collector, the one who thrives on order and structure.
So why do so many YouTubers paint watercolors in little squares? I asked ChatGPT about it. The best answer came from a quote: “Because everyone else does.”
