Have you seen those 500 color sets of paint? Do you really need all that?
While it may be fun to pretend to be a princess and have every color available to mankind… this really not a good plan for buying paint.
Unless you are really enamored with a special tint, it’s best to leave most of the colors at the store and only bring home a few… and I will tell you why.
Paints age and lose efficacy. It's best to work with fresh paint. You can make every color from just a few so the actual list you need is pretty short.
When given too many choices of tints it’s easy to make a mistake and blend with the wrong shade (looks light blue but in actuality the blend has purple in it… but it’s not apparent until you touch your brush to the canvas… ooops!).
When working with only a few colors you will blend your shades yourself and be sure that the base for the shade does not have any red in it… this time… not like I did that one time (see comment above).
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A Cool Red
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A Warm Red
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A Cool Blue
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A Warm Blue
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A Cool Yellow
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A Warm Yellow
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Phthalo Green
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Umber or Sepia
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Paynes Grey or something like it.
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White
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Black
Shoutout to Alyssa Bermudez for this lovely list! I added white and black for the real beginners.
Remember to buy larger tubes of white and black as those paints are usually used up faster than other colors.
While researching this I came across a few different lists but the way Alyssa wrote it made the most sense to me. Thank you!
Well, there you have it. Buying expensive paint just got a lot easier. All you need is three different brushes and these 11 tubes of paint and you are set. No need to buy the 448-tube set.
If you are still learning to blend colors, take a look at some of our older articles on blending colors. We will be covering blending in upcoming articles… All you have to do is make sure that you are on our mailing list and that our email address is in your address book. That way you can be sure to receive every email from us in your inbox.
