Every Christmas somebody is given a wooden box of forty colours, and every January they bring it to a class and do not know where to start.
The five we use
A warm yellow, a cool red, a deep blue, a burnt sienna and white. From those five you can mix nearly every colour you will meet on the Cornish coast.
Why fewer is better
Mixing teaches you what colours are made of. A painter who mixes her own green from blue and yellow knows why the fields at dusk are not the green on the tube.
A first exercise
Paint a row of six squares from your blue at full strength to the palest wash. Then do the same for each of the others. It is dull, and it is the most useful hour you will spend.
When to buy more
When you have wanted a colour you could not mix three times in a row. Then buy that one, and only that one.
