Now I'm going to talk about paints. You can get the paints if you want in those what we call "paint pans," like the pans for children at school, and they'll work fairly well, but generally they're quite grainy because they haven't been ground fine enough. With the better-quality paints like tube paints, they come in two different grades. They have a student grade called "scholastic" or student grade, and then they have a professional grade. And professional grade is generally ground a little finer, and has less filler and less medium in it. Now, the medium of watercolor is gum Arabic, and what happens is in the lower-priced paints, they just add more gum Arabic instead of pigment. It costs them less. So your better-quality stuff can be quite expensive, depending on the brand, and you can get them in hobby stores or online. Basically, the colors that I have my students start with are - and this is set up in a color wheel if you'll notice. It starts with grey, goes to dark blues, to greens, I have my earth tones right in the middle an then I go from yellow up to reddish violet. So the main ten colors to start with are: Payne's Grey; Phthalo Blue; Cobalt Blue, which is one of your primary colors; Phthalo Green; then you're going to have Yellow Ochre, which is right here. You're going to have Burnt Sienna. You're going to have Burnt Umber, which is a chocolate brown. You're going to have Yellow, and like Aureolin, because it's a transparent yellow, or you can get a Lemon Yellow type yellow. You'll want an orange, because you can't create an orange out of yellow and red quite as brilliant as the orange that's made in the tube and this is generally Cadmium Orange. And you can use either Cadmium Red or Naphthal Red. You can see that there's very little difference, and Naphthal Red is what I generally like to use. And Permanent Rose, which is also Quinacridone Rose, and then those are the main colors. There are other colors as well.
