Don't hesitate to buy fine arts professional colors. Even if more expensive, they will last very long and you will not regret it, even if eventually you give up and offer them to your nephew! I prefer ROWNEY, WINDSOR & NEWTON or SENNELIER because they are nearer from real colors than oder brands. If you begin, you just need a very tiny palette like:

• aureolin yellow
• cobalt blue
• garance red or rose doré

Watercolor is the art of melting colors. With just three colors you may reach a very large range of all existing hue. This means the whole rainbow! Further, light and shadows may be rendered solely by ONE color: this is WASH DRAWING. So if you begin completely you would just need one tube of payne's grey (cold color) or sepia (warm color). This clearly means the number of colors you use is not as important as how you use them.

On the other hand, it is sometimes important to get quick easy access to the whole rainbow or the most used colors, for instance if you paint on location. So you may add some additional colors, depending on the subject. Here is my own palette for landscapes (purely indicative and certainly not definitive):

aureolin yellow naples yellow cadmium yellow yellow ochre burnt umber burnt sienna

garance red or rose doré crimson alizarin cadmium red cobalt blue prussian blue indigo

coeruleum sap green hooker's green olive green viridian payne's grey

Get any complete water colorist set and you are done. Just please choose professional fine art colors. In association with a good paper, they will help you doing something very different...

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