You don’t need forty tubes. A split-primary palette, a warm and a cool version of each primary plus white, mixes almost anything. It’s the default palette on this site: Cadmium Yellow and Lemon Yellow, Cadmium Red and Quinacridone Magenta, Ultramarine Blue and Phthalo Blue, and Titanium White.
Which tubes do the work
Not every tube pulls the same weight. Across the library, Titanium White is in 145 recipes, Cadmium Red in 126 and Phthalo Blue in 116. Lemon Yellow and Quinacridone Magenta are in only 55 each, but they cover what the others can’t reach cleanly: without the magenta there are no clean violets or hot pinks, and without the lemon no cool, sharp yellows. Mustard and Yellow Ochre are both mostly Lemon Yellow.
- Buy a big tube of Titanium White. You’ll use more of it than anything else.
- Cadmium Red and Phthalo Blue are the workhorses: between them they mix the darks, the browns, the greys and the blacks.
- Phthalo Blue is so strong that a small tube lasts a long time.
- Hues (‘Cadmium Red Hue’) are cheaper substitutes made from other pigments. They mix similarly but not identically; the Colour Index code on the tube, like PR108, tells you what’s really inside.
Reading a recipe
Recipes are given in parts, which are a ratio, not an amount: a drop, a palette-knife tip, a spoonful, whatever suits how much paint you need. ‘A touch’ means less than a part, a speck you add at the end. Mix the larger amounts first, then nudge with the small ones, and add strong paints a little at a time.
Acrylic dries darker
Acrylic paint is milky when wet because the binder scatters light; as it dries the binder turns clear and the colour darkens a little. Mix a touch lighter than your target, test a dab on scrap paper and let it dry before you commit. It matters most for mid and dark colours, and least for pale pastels.
Adding tubes later
Convenience colours earn their place when you mix the same thing over and over. Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna and Burnt Umber save time on earths and skin; Phthalo Green and Dioxazine Purple give jewel tones from the tube. Add a paint to your palette and every recipe on the site re-solves to use it where it helps.