>>3545280No kiddings I'd recommend for you to flip through this book (it's found on every art book thread) and watch some Gurney videos (
>>3546260). For me they gave so much and I had a direction where to start from. They are great because they don't give you a formula how to mix a certain color - but give you an overall idea how color works. Color is relative and a neutral grey in cool blue background will look almost red (google "strawberry illusion")
Like
>>3545368 said - you can pretty much get away with the primary colors. If you want to extend that palette, you can go for one cool and one warm color per primary. e.g. for extending red color you could use Winsor Red for warm and Alizarin Crimson for cool - for yellow color you could use Cadmium Yellow for warm and Lemon Yellow for cool.
But for this you should understand about warm and cool qualities of color and how to use them. Effective paintings use well defined color schemes that you pretty much know before starting. You want to ask yourself - do I want this painting to be warm, cool or a mixture of both. If you want a warm painting, consider adding cool highlights and vice versa. If you want to use more colors e.g. for overcast landscape painting, then group your warms and cools. Use warm colors for lights and cool colors for shadows.
If you want to paint a red barn with sunlight on it's front, use warm red for the front wall like winsor red and mix it light value. For shadow side wall, mix a cooler color with darker value from the red and alizarin crimson (very cool red) to get almost a tint of cool purple in shadow side.
If you are just getting used to painting, the easiest and most effective way to learn manipulating the paint and it's value is to lose the color mixing completely - try a monochromatic painting. Do a value study using only one color (reddish browns are great for monochromatic studies). Do a painting of a skull using only Burnt Sienna or Burnt Umber.
