Payne’s grey

is usu­ally a con­ve­nience mix­ture of a black and one or two other col­ors that cre­ates a cool dark grey. I don’t find paints like that use­ful, because I can so eas­ily mix them myself. On one or two occa­sions, I’ve encoun­tered some­one in an online art forum who avoids black because it is a “dead color,” but uses Payne’s grey. How is that dif­fer­ent from hav­ing black on your palette?

Another good one is King’s Blue, which usu­ally a mix­ture of pthalo or ultra­ma­rine blue and white. What exactly is the point?

I try to pay atten­tion to which pig­ments are in the paints I buy. I have a few multi-pigment paints left over from before I got more focused on color, and I still use those from time to time. But for the most part I stick with single-pigment paints. They pro­vide more flex­i­bil­ity and a higher max­i­mum chroma (because mix­ing paints reduces chroma). I also much pre­fer to work with and under­stand the indi­vid­ual char­ac­ter of par­tic­u­lar pig­ments, which is some­thing I can’t do with con­ve­nience mixtures.