Colour Theory

http://foliver.deviantart.com/
 
A great deviant art post about colour theory from Fernando who is a traditional artist from Spain.   

"I use Titan because those are the most common in Spain, no particular reason. Also I buy the medium line, not the super expensive one. Just avoid the cheaper ones. And try not to mix different brands because they may use different mediums.

About colors there's a lot to say, but I'll try to make it short and somewhat simple: my opinion is you should use the minimum (at least when you are learning), that is three primary colors plus white and mix them to get the color you want. Which primary colors? cyan, magenta and yellow. You can also use the classic Goethe's color theory (which was used by all the classic painters) and use yellow, red and blue as primaries: with those you get a somewhat smaller color range, but one that contains 95% of what you can find in nature. Use what you are more comfortable with, what makes you mix the colors you want more accurately. What do I use? it depends: for example this painting was made with Prussian blue (really deep blue), cadmium yellow and "carmín de garanza" (dark crimson red). Those give you a very "dry" color range that I really like, even if there's some colors you can't get like vivid blues or reds. Lately I've been using those three plus cyan and magenta. The point is to use the ones that will give you the color range you want for your painting. Or just use cyan/magenta/yellow which in theory you can mix to get every possible color... that's probably the way to go when learning."