Oil and Acrylic Colours

For a basic set of oil or acrylic paints you will need the following colours.
With these you should be able to mix most colours. There are, of course, some colours that you can't mix, these include violet and magenta.

The colours can be split into three sections, warm, mid and cold

	Warm	Mid	Cold
Blues	Ultramarine	Cobalt, Ceruleum	Prussian
Reds	Vermillion	Cadmium Red	Alizarin
Yellows	Cadmium yellow deep	Cadmium Yellow Chrome	Lemon

Earth Colours	Yellow ochre, raw sienna, burnt sienna, raw umber, burnt umber
Whites	Flake white - slightly creamy, quite quick drying for a white, they are usually slow drying. Titanium white - silver white, slower drying and not such good coverage
Black	Ivory black - the better black to get as it dilutes much better than the other which is lamp black.

Payne's Grey

Useful - this helps to mix colours, it is slightly blue and makes lovely greens and lilacs.

Artist quality oil paints tend to vary in texture and thickness. They are expensive compared to student quality but they are expensive for a very good reason - they are usually more colourfast and truer to the colour it says on the tube.

However, Georgian Rowney range are perfectly satisfactory for what you want when you begin to paint and are reliable in that they are usually consistent in texture and thickness and the colours are lightfast in the main, i.e. they retain their colour for a long time despite being exposed to light. They thin down well and are easy to use. I would recommend these to begin with and advance on to artist's quality colours later.

Acrylic paints are acrylic paints are acrylic paints. They are completely synthetic and handle consistently. They thin with water but you can use other mediums to extent them or thicken them to paint 'impasto' (with texture). There is also a range of acrylic paints called Cryla Flow, these are runnier.