Coloured Pencil Tips - 1 Selecting a Colour

One of the things I want to do on my blog is develop a series of mini tutorials. These will be expanded in my technique guides and I plan to discuss each topic in detail when I start to write my book.
Tip 1 describes two methods I use for selecting the local colour of an object.

1. Aids to Selecting the Local Colour
a) The Homemade Colour Chart
I have created a series of colour charts for my pencils, the image shows two sheets for Polychromos pencils.
To make the charts I cut a colour chart from one of the art magazines into A5 sheets so that for each colour I have a record of the pencil number, the name and the lightfast rating.
I stuck these onto some white card leaving space at the end for a sample of each colour. I used an actual drawing surface, in this case Arches Smooth Watercolour paper for my strip of colour which was drawn using progressively more pressure.
The next step was to laminate the card for protection and finally punch a hole through the colour.
You can then use the sampes if you are struggling to decide on a local colour by choosing the colour you think is closest from your samples and placing the punched hole over your reference. By isolating the colour it makes it easy to see which pencil to use.

b) The paint chart method.
I described this a few years ago but for ease of reference have included it again.

While visiting a DIY store I picked up a selection of paint shade charts in the colours I was likely to use.
Again I punched a hole in each colour and use in the same way to the homemade chart.
Although these aren't pencil colours once you select the nearest paint colour you can hold your pencil against the shade chart until you find the nearest match.