What do people suggest as a basic set of watercolours for a beginner please.

Welcome to the wonderful world of watercolour painting. I have used the Whitenights watercolour paints for many years. The colours are vibrant and lift from the paintbox onto your brush easily. They are also very good value for money. There are many colours to be tempted with but you do not need them all. It is good practice to learn to mix your colours from a limited palette. I suggest that you buy a set of 24 of these wonderful paints to start with. You can then buy individual colours to replace those you use most of. If you want to paint flowers there are a few other colours I would recommend. Let me know if you want to know these. I hope this helps you. Happy painting.

Start with a basic set and learn to mix from the beginning. I began with a large set of paints and am subsequently having to go back to learn how to mix colours. I just used all the different colours in my box.

I would suggest you get a limited set of colours, and the SAA do artist quality paint in tubes that will last a long time, and are very well priced.

With my beginners groups I use a basic set as follows, raw sienna, burnt sienna, burnt umber, ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, lemon yellow, auriolin, alizarin crimson and/or rose madder, and finally a colour the SAA doesn't have, perylene green. Play with the colours in mixes of two colours only to see the huge variation obtainable. Greens are sometimes awkward, I don't use pery' green straight from the tube but good variety can be obtained with the yellows, and a really good dark green with burnt sienna.

Best of luck

Gordon Brady

For a good basic set of watercolours you need each primary with a bias to each side of the primary. For example you need a violet blue, the green blue, a violet red, and a orange red also an orange yellow and green yellow then your earth colours.
That these I use in order French ultramarine, cobalt blue, permanent magenta, cadmium red, cadmium yellow and lemon yellow. The Earth colours are raw sienna, burnt sienna, burnt umber, raw umber.
I then have a number of colours that I particularly like such as cobalt violet and cadmium orange but these are not essential to your basic palette.
I hope this was of some help
kind regards, Dave