Which colours should I actually buy for my first palette?

The reason a beginner's mixed purple comes out grey has nothing to do with skill. It is that most red paints lean towards orange, and orange contains yellow, and yellow is the complementary of purple — so the mix is neutralising itself before it starts. Buying two versions of each primary, one leaning each way, solves the problem permanently and costs less than a large boxed set.

Step by step

1. Understand that no paint is a pure primary.Every real pigment leans one way round the colour wheel. A cadmium red leans towards orange; a quinacridone or crimson red leans towards violet. Once you know which way each of your paints leans, mixing becomes predictable rather than a lottery.
2. Buy two of each primary, one leaning each way.A warm yellow leaning to orange and a cool yellow leaning to green; a warm red leaning to orange and a cool red leaning to violet; a warm blue leaning to violet and a cool blue leaning to green. Six tubes total. The specific pigment names vary by brand and medium.
3. Mix each secondary from the two primaries that lean towards it.For a clean orange, use the warm red and the warm yellow — both already lean that way. For a clean violet, use the cool red and the warm blue. For a clean green, use the cool yellow and the cool blue. Using the wrong pair introduces the third primary and greys the result.
4. Use the wrong pair deliberately when you want a neutral.A warm blue with a cool yellow gives a soft, natural, slightly grey green, which is far more useful in a landscape than the acid green a clean mix gives. Muted colour is a tool, not a failure.
5. Buy the largest tube of white you can in opaque media.In acrylic, oil and gouache you will use white faster than everything else combined. Titanium white is the standard opaque one. In watercolour, buy no white at all — the paper is your white.
6. Add earth colours once you know why you want them.A yellow ochre, a burnt sienna and a raw umber are all mixable from the six, but they are cheap, convenient and beautiful, and they do most of the work in a landscape or a portrait. They are the first sensible additions.
7. Consider skipping black at first.Tube black flattens whatever it touches. Mixing your darks from the complementary pairs you already have — a dark blue with a burnt sienna, for instance — gives darks with a colour temperature you can control. Add a black later, for specific purposes.
8. Make a mixing chart before you paint anything.Grid your six colours against each other and paint every combination. It takes an hour, it produces a reference you will use for years, and it teaches you your own paints faster than any amount of reading.

Tips

• The specific pigment matters more than the marketing name. Two tubes both called Crimson from different brands can be different pigments and behave differently — check the pigment code on the tube.
• Add colours one at a time, when you have repeatedly found yourself unable to mix something. A palette that grows from need is far more useful than one that arrived in a box.
• A limited palette forces harmony. Many professional painters work from three or four colours plus white for a whole picture, precisely because everything then shares a family resemblance.
• Gouache is worth knowing about as a fourth option — opaque water-based paint that dries flat and matt, re-wettable, excellent for illustration and for flat colour. It uses the same palette logic.

Common mistakes

• Buying a large boxed set of 24 or 36 colours — Most of them are convenience mixes you could make, several are fugitive, and having a tube for every colour prevents you from ever learning to mix. A big set is usually cheaper paint as well.
• Buying one red, one yellow and one blue — It is the classic beginner palette and it makes clean secondary colours impossible, because every mix drags in a trace of the third primary.
• Buying student-grade paint for the primaries and artist-grade for the exotics — The opposite is right. The six colours you use constantly are where pigment quality shows most.

Questions people ask