Beleive it or not, just a canvas plus red, blue and yellow acrylic paint will be enough.
This is actually not completely true, but I appreciate the point you are making.
Something we shouldn't overlook is that there no pigments that fit perfectly on a color wheel. In other words, there's no blue pigment, its always blueish green or blueish purple.
This has been a challenge for pigment makers for centuries and has a complicated history.
Maybe sometimes a perfect pigment or dye is found, color wise, but then it turns out to easily fade, aka 'fugitive', so artists, the ones who expect their art work to last for more than a few years, are stuck with certain colors.
Why does this matter? Its because of mixing. You might think you have paints of the primaries, blue, yellow, and red, and you need a bright green, so you mix the blue with the yellow, and you end up with an muddy olive color.
Turns out your blue was leaning towards being purplish, and when mixed with the yellow, a component of grey was produced, because they are opposite.
So how do you get a nice bright green? You need to mix a greenish blue with a greenish yellow.
In practice this results in artists, who want to paint with a full range of colors, need 6 primary colors.
For example, two good lightfast (not destroyed by light) blues are ultramarine (very old pigment), and a newer phthalo blue (much more modern). The ultramarine leans towards the violet and the phthalo, to varying degrees, towards green. In the old days I think prussian blue was the greenish blue of choice, but its a weak color and is easily overpowered.
Cobalt blue, if I'm not mistaken, is the closest thing we have to a lightfast primary color.
Artist really hit the jackpot with blues. Some are very old. They are also nicely transparent, which can make a difference in technique
The bright reds and bright yellows aren't so good, and the ones that are lightfast are supposed to be toxic. And not very transparent either.
If you don't care about the brightness of your reds and yellows you are in luck, there are plenty of rust and dirt pigments like iron oxide, sienna and umber.
This is a complicated subject. Here's a book about it
This is actually not completely true, but I appreciate the point you are making.
Something we shouldn't overlook is that there no pigments that fit perfectly on a color wheel. In other words, there's no blue pigment, its always blueish green or blueish purple.
This has been a challenge for pigment makers for centuries and has a complicated history.
Maybe sometimes a perfect pigment or dye is found, color wise, but then it turns out to easily fade, aka 'fugitive', so artists, the ones who expect their art work to last for more than a few years, are stuck with certain colors.
Why does this matter? Its because of mixing. You might think you have paints of the primaries, blue, yellow, and red, and you need a bright green, so you mix the blue with the yellow, and you end up with an muddy olive color.
Turns out your blue was leaning towards being purplish, and when mixed with the yellow, a component of grey was produced, because they are opposite.
So how do you get a nice bright green? You need to mix a greenish blue with a greenish yellow.
In practice this results in artists, who want to paint with a full range of colors, need 6 primary colors.
For example, two good lightfast (not destroyed by light) blues are ultramarine (very old pigment), and a newer phthalo blue (much more modern). The ultramarine leans towards the violet and the phthalo, to varying degrees, towards green. In the old days I think prussian blue was the greenish blue of choice, but its a weak color and is easily overpowered.
Cobalt blue, if I'm not mistaken, is the closest thing we have to a lightfast primary color.
Artist really hit the jackpot with blues. Some are very old. They are also nicely transparent, which can make a difference in technique
The bright reds and bright yellows aren't so good, and the ones that are lightfast are supposed to be toxic. And not very transparent either.
If you don't care about the brightness of your reds and yellows you are in luck, there are plenty of rust and dirt pigments like iron oxide, sienna and umber.
This is a complicated subject. Here's a book about it
http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Yellow-Dont-Make-Green/dp/0967962...