Making swatch charts — or swatch cards — for your art supplies and/or craft supplies can help you in several ways.

1. It lets you identify what supplies you have without hauling everything out, which may help you narrow down what you need to get out, and minimize the mess and fuss.
2. It lets you identify which supplies you have — and which you don’t — so you know what to buy when you’re ready to shop.
3. When you’re working on a project, it gives you an idea of what colors you have available and how they’ll look together, so you can choose colors without having to scribble on scratch paper over and over again every time.  (Essentially, you’ve done the scribble-on-scratch-paper thing once for most or all of your projects!)
4. Depending on how you create your swatches, it can give you an idea of how your various supplies behave, preventing awkward mis-matches between materials and intent.

Swatch Chart Instructions & Shortcuts

Templates and preprinted charts to color in can make this task easier and more consistent in appearance.  I curated the following tutorials & printable templates from around the internet.  Different ones are geared toward different types of supplies.

• Copic Markers Hex Chart – ($5.99) This chart is numbered with the Copic color numbers, and they’re clustered by similarity.
• Generic Blank Hex Chart – This is an image.  Click on it to enlarge it, then right-click to download.  This is unbranded, but clustered by color.
• About Swatching Inks – from Scrapbook.com.  This article covers several ways to swatch inks for crafting.  I really like the swatch layout with the square boxes, but the printables they link are all branded & pre-labeled.
• Waffle Flower Stamps – ($$) If you’re hoping to make swatches on tags or something like that, Waffle Flower makes stamps for creating swatch layouts.  Personally, I think they’re really expensive for the purpose (except maybe the color wheels one, which is kind of complex), but if you do this a lot, maybe they’re worth it for you.
• Waffle Flower Generic Swatch Charts – This free printable has 6×6 or 12×4 sets of rectangular blocks.
• Big Book of Color Charts – ($$) This is a really fun approach.  It’s a combination coloring book/swatch book, with prelabeled charts for some of the most popular brands of colored pencils, inks, etc. and blank charts for other brands — all embellished with line art you can color.
• Heart Marker Swatch Sheet – If you want to add an extra element of cuteness to your marker swatches, you might like this sheet with a little smiley heart as the swatch “box.”  This is designed for a particular set of markers, but you should be able to use it with any type.
• Swatch Book – I like the idea of swatching on smaller cards in sleeves like this, because you can arrange, rearrange, and sort as necessary, take them out if you need to, and swatch on different types of paper on the same page (e.g. if you need to swatch some colors on a black background) — but still be able to see a lot of them at once.  The coin pages would also work together nicely with the other sleeves I use for storing magazine clippings.This method probably works better for craft supplies than art supplies, where this might get bulky and expensive for swatching full sets of colored pencils, Copic markers, etc.

100 Polypropylene 20-Pocket Coin Pages for 2×220 Pro 20-Pocket Coin Pages for 2×2Swatches Clear Silicone Stamp

• Pen Swatch Charts & More – ($$) MysticSparkleWings on DeviantArt has several premium (paid) downloads of swatch chart packages.  One is designed especially for swatching pens.  Others are for swatch cards, for color combinations, etc.  The downside is you have to create an account on DeviantArt to download.  The upside is they’re not very expensive; for under $1 you can get a whole heap of different swatching layouts in a single zipped download
• Making Comparison Easy – I really like the way this artist uses a hole in a set of swatches to make color comparison easy.
• My Own Swatch Charts/Cards – I liked the idea of the marker type icons in MysticSparkleWings’ swatch charts/cards, but I wanted a different layout.  So I’ve made my own pages for swatching markers and pens.

More About Color

Depending on how you use color, you might also want swatches of certain color combinations.  Most likely, artists will need this more routinely than crafters.  These charts are designed more for tracking how your colors mix than what the individual colors look like on their own.

• How to Make a Watercolor Mixing Chart/Grid
• Colo(u)r Mixing Guide for Kids – This is a single-page worksheet covering the basics of color mixing.  It’s an excellent introduction to color-mixing concepts.  It could also be useful as a basic swatching test for new materials to see how well they compare when it comes to basics & blending.  (British spelling) 
• Color Mixing Chart – Available in two different sizes, this printable chart allows you to display the color-mixing options for a set of colors in both a half-grid and a color wheel-style format.
• Color Mixing Charts – Here’s another color-mixing chart for 12 base colors, along with instructions for using it.  (Good intro for newbies to colored pencils, as well as for general swatching/organization!).  There are also a couple other color-mixing swatch printables.

With some media, you’ll also want to know some things about the qualities/behavior of the product.  These tutorials are for swatching watercolors, noting qualities like opacity, how well they create a gradient, and how they spread on wet paper.

You might also have other media with certain qualities that need to be tested beyond straight color.  (For instance, crafters & journalers swatching white gel pens often want to know how they behave on black paper and over top of other media, like paint or alcohol ink.)

• Making Watercolor Swatch Cards – This blog post contains instructions for a “template” to draw onto watercolor paper to swatch the gradient capacities of a set of watercolors.  (You could probably adapt this to 2×2 and slide these into the same coin pages listed above, or to 2.5×3.5 and put them in trading card pages, or insert them as described into business card sleeves.) 
• How to Make Watercolor Swatches – This is another artist’s description of her method for swatching watercolors.  It’s similar to — but different from — the previous one.
• Yet Another Watercolor Swatch Instruction – Here’s a third watercolor artist describing her method.  I really like this one for fitting a lot of information into a compact area.  It doesn’t include the wet-on-wet test of the previous swatch set.  (I think you could print these if you find someone with a laser printer, or have them printed at a copy shop instead of trying an inkjet.) 

If Your Markers/Pens Are Dried Out

As you’re swatching, you may come across some dried-out markers or pens.  Before you assume they’re a lost cause, you can try the following:

For permanent markers, pour a little rubbing alcohol into the cap or a small paper cup.  Set the tip of the marker in the cup for a few minutes, until you just start to see ink swirling from it.  Remove the marker from the alcohol, recap it, and let it sit horizontal for 15 minutes or more.

For water-based markers, try the same method but with water in place of alcohol.

For alcohol markers, carefully remove the nib and use an eyedropper or syringe to add a few drops of rubbing alcohol to the barrel.  Replace the nib and allow the marker to sit, horizontally, overnight.  (The instructions I’ve seen used 91% rubbing alcohol.  I don’t know for sure if the 70% stuff would work, but that’s what I used to reactivate my permanent markers.)  I haven’t tried it yet, but the method for permanent markers might work here, too.

For gel pens, try “huffing” on the tips (breathing moist breath on them), then scribbling on scratch paper.  If that doesn’t work, try carefully steaming the tip.  (Basically, if these still have ink in them but don’t work, it’s usually because the ink at the very end has dried up and gummed the roller ball into place.  If you can dissolve that bit at the end and free it up, sometimes the pen will start working again.)