The official Daniel Smith Sandrine Maugy Palette

Hi everyone,

Today I am posting something that means a lot to me: Daniel Smith have released the Sandrine Maugy palette, in the form of one of their dot cards! As you know by now, Daniel Smith is my favourite paint brand. I love their choices of pigments, the fact that most of their paints are single pigments, that so many are transparent and lightfast, the fact that they ditched the super non-environmentally-friendly Cadmiums, and of course the fact that they have a non animal-derived binder, making most of the colours vegan-friendly. To have them acknowledge me as an artist they are happy to be associated with is very nice. At the end of this post I am including a link to a YouTube video in which I show you all the 18 colours, but before we get to that, here is the story of how it happened.

In the summer of 2022, my publisher Search Press invited me to demonstrate in their marquee at the Patchings Festival, to launch my new book Botanical Watercolours through the Seasons. I was at the festival for a couple of days and this is where I met Paul, who runs Premium Art Brands, the Daniel Smith distributor in the UK. I told Paul that my whole book was painted with DS watercolours, so he came to my demonstrations and liked the fact that I taught not only botanical painting, but a lot about pigments and colour as well. He also liked my book. So we had a chat afterwards and this is when the plan was hatched: he was going to ask Daniel Smith if they would be interested in releasing a dot card of my palette. And they were!
The initial phase took a few months, selecting the colours, writing the biography for the back, proof-reading, putting everything together. I really liked the fact that no one tried to influence my choices. It was entirely up to me to select the colours and share my favourites. The proof-reading took a while because when I sent the initial palette, I had the colours in the same order as they are in my real palette, an order that follows the colour wheel. But when I received the first proof, the colours had been dutifully rearranged in alphabetical order. You can imagine how that completely threw me! My brain jumbled up and I just couldn’t cope with an alphabetical colour name setting, it really didn’t make sense to me. I asked if we could rearrange them in my way and Jenn, who was my contact doing all the work in the US, was very understanding… She put everything back in the original order. So now I have 6 lines of 3 paints, starting at the top: yellows, reds, pink and violets, blues, greens and neutrals. Phew. That looks more like it 😀

After that it went into production. Some people in a big factory near Seattle painted thousands of paint dots on hundreds of cards. And this is what it looks like:

I have listed the Dot Card in my Etsy shop. Please click here to have a look.

I can’t tell you how excited I am about this. And now I will let you discover the colours in the video.

Happy Painting!