Basic Colors to Begin Acrylic Painting
When you first start painting with acrylics, it might be challenging to decide which colours to buy because there are so many options. Most people prefer the convenience of being able to squeeze a specific desired colour directly from a tube rather than mixing a rainbow of colours from just three primary colours (blue, red, and yellow). Additionally, some colours from the tube are simply brighter or darker than anything you can mix yourself. As a result, it's important to learn how to condense your colour palette while still being able to mix the colours you want. You can't, after all, purchase or carry around every colour and tube of paint that's available.
While there are a variety of limited colour palettes you can use to begin painting with acrylics, the colours listed here make up a good basic palette of acrylic colors, and from it, you should be able to mix any colours you might need.
Red
Pick up a bottle of cadmium red medium (you also get a cadmium red light and dark). The warm, yellowish red colour of cadmium red medium is comparatively opaque.
Blue
An vivid and incredibly adaptable colour is phthalo blue. Due to its high tinting strength, only a small amount needs to be combined with white to produce lighter blues. It gets extremely dark when combined with burnt umber. (Also known as monestial blue, phthalocyanine blue, and thalo blue.) Because of its strong tinting power, phthalo blue requires some experience to utilise, although many artists vouch for it. Ultramarine blue is a good substitute for phthalo blue and a very helpful standard blue to have if you discover that you prefer to utilise it more carefully. Although the actual hue is different, it is transparent like phthalo blue and has a high tinting strength but not as high as phthalo blue.
Yellow
Take a tube of cadmium yellow medium to start. If you want to make a lighter yellow, simply add white to this. However, if you find yourself doing this frequently, you might want to also buy a tube of cadmium yellow light. Remember that adding black tends to result in an olive green rather than a deeper yellow when you want to darken yellow, so try adding its complementary color, purple, instead.
White
Titanium white is a bright, opaque white with a significant tinting power. Additionally, some manufacturers offer "mixing white," which is typically the least expensive and is designed to blend well with other colors, as the name suggests.
Black
Black Mars black is a relatively opaque hue that should be diluted with other colours until its potency has been exhausted. Ivory black is another choice, but only if you don't mind that it's formed of burnt bones (it was originally created from ivory).
Brown
Warm chocolate-colored burnt umber is a very versatile and likely to become indispensable brown. It works well to make other colours darker in tone. Similar to raw umber, but a little lighter and colder.
Green
Greens can be tricky to blend consistently unless you're fastidious about writing down the colours and ratios you used. Bright bluish green is known as phthalo green. It can be blended with cadmium yellow medium to produce a range of green hues.
Orange
Yes, you can make orange by combining yellow and red, but if you plan to mix oranges frequently, it will save you time to buy cadmium orange in a tube.
Purple
A pure purple can be very difficult to mix, especially when using warm reds and blues. Therefore, it is worthwhile to purchase a very dark purple, such as dioxazine purple.