We can trust any reputable colourman to fit a box with paints, and we strongly advise buying the best paints and leaving those of a cheaper grade alone. It is by far the best economy. The small boxes contain eight to fourteen half-pans.
Group your colours together carefully. Nothing hampers a young artist more effectually than sprinkling paints haphazardly in a paint-box. When cobalt jostles vermilion and lemon yellow flanks ivory black your paint-box is unbusiness-like. Group together blues, reds and yellows, browns and black.
A box to hold twelve pans should contain the following colours:
| Chrome yellow | Vermilion |
| Yellow ochre | Vandyke brown |
| Raw sienna | Ivory black |
| Burnt sienna | Prussian blue |
| Light red | Ultramarine |
| Crimson alizarin | Cobalt |
For a box of fourteen colours the following is a good selection:
| Lemon yellow | Light red |
| Chrome No. 1 | Raw sienna |
| Yellow ochre | Burnt sienna |
| Vermilion | Sepia |
| Crimson alizarin | Ivory black |
| Cobalt | |
| French blue of French ultramarine | |
| Prussian blue | |
| A tube of Chinese white | |
For a beginner a small range is better than a large number of colours. A multiplicity of tints is apt to bewilder the mind. By experimenting with a few paints we can obtain a surprisingly wide range of tints. We must learn too the good as well as the bad qualities; how one tint will permeate others, how the liquid brilliance of one will neutralize the dull opaque quality of another.
