With such a dazzling range of colours available you are spoilt for choice, so I suggest using a limited palette to start with, then adding further colours later to suit your subject matte. Much is written about the merits of using a limited palette and how the great masters often used only four or five colours, but it is far better to make your wider selection based on logic and personal preference.

WARM AND COOL COLOURS - THE ESSENTIAL CHOICE: It is important to start off with a sensible selection of colours that offer you flexibility in colour mixing. For me, this means including a warm and cool version of each of the three primary colours of yellow, red and blue - the three colours that cannot be mixed by blending other colours together - plus a few "useful" extra colours. This gives you an economical starter set that allows plenty of scope for mixing further colours without costing you a fortune. We think of cool colours as those that present a cool appearance - for example, some blues, greens and the greenish-looking yellows; and warm colours as those that convey warmth - for example, oranges, reds, orange-yellows and browns.

THE STARTER PALETTE: A typical Chromacolour starter palette might consist of three cool primary colours such as Lemon Yellow, Alizarine Crimson and say, Cobalt Blue, which is really a mid-tone blue (a pleasant cool alternative is Cerulean Blue); plus three warm ones such as Cadmium Yellow Medium (or Chroma Yellow, which is similar but stronger), Cadmium Red Medium and Ultramarine. The choice of primaries is very much a personal one and you may prefer to select a completely different range of colours, but try to keep to the general principle of one cool and one warm version of each of the three primaries to form the basis of your palette.

OTHER USEFUL COLOURS: For the additional colours, I would suggest Raw Sienna (or Yellow Ochre), which will give awarm glow to your underpainting and will also mix with blue to give a useful range of greens; and Burnt Umber, a warm deep brown, which, when mixed with blue, will give you pleasant greys as well as strong dark tones close to black. Some artists prefer Burnt Sienna, which also makes strong darks when mixe with blue. Cadmium Orange and Rose are colours likely to appeal to flower painters and for a more powerful blue I would choose Prussian Blue. In selecting colours we are fortunate not to have to worry about wheter they are fugitive or not because all Chromacolour paints are permanent and do not fade. For painting in opaque style you will need white (Titanium White is recommended for mixing, Chroma White is useful as an opaque white paint). If you prefer ready-bought greens to mixing your own, there is a wide choice. I usually like to mix my own greens, but I do sometimes use Viridian because, although it is a powerful, rather strident staining colour, it can be mixed with other colours to produce more subtle shades of green or diluted or mixed with blue to suggest the distant sea in coastal scenes. I rarely use Black because you seldom see a true black in real life and it is easy to mix a dark colour that comes close but is more interesting; for example, Burnt Umber or Burnt Sienna mixed with a dark blue such as Ultramarine.

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