Learning to paint with watercolors is complicated enough. The late watercolorist and teacher  Ron Ranson advocated a minimalist approach of limiting the number of brushes a beginner should use as well as limiting their palette to only 7 colors. I’ll address the brushes in another post. As to the palette colors, they are Alizarin Crimson PR206 (cool) Burnt Umber PBr7 PY42 (warm) Lemon Yellow PY175 (warm) Light Red PR101 (warm) Paynes Gray PBk7 PB15 (cool) Raw Sienna PR101 PY42 (warm) and Ultramarine Blue PB29 (cool).

[Note: The alphanumeric designators indicate the main pigment or pigments used to produce the color while the warm and cool label speaks to the color’s “color wheel” temperature.] 

Ranson’s reasoning for this limiting of colors is to free the student from all the complex decisions created by potentially limitless color choices as well as allowing them to focus on really learning how to work with and mix their own colors with a very familiar set of base colors. Notice there are no premixed greens. ( I’ll address that in another post.) By being so frugal with the number of colors, you get to know them intimately and to understand how each color reacts with the others.  Below are my tubes of paints (21 ml size) on my plastic tray palette. You can click on the images to see them enlarged. 

In this practice exercise, I chose to paint a series of tonal washes using each of my palette colors plus Black. The tonal washes are meant to show three values for each color: a dark, and two middle values. They are painted with a controllably wet brush on dry paper.

From left to right, top row to bottom row : Black, Burnt Umber, Ultramarine, Raw Sienna, Alizarin Crimson, Light Red, Lemon Yellow, and Paynes Gray. You can click on the images to see them enlarged.