[Timothy C. Tyler]

There are many exercise artists can perform to get to know their options. Here's a few maybe others will list ideas.

Place a bright red and ivory black and Titanium white along one edge of your palette. These are your base colors. Now introduce any other color you wish to get to know onto the palette. See how far these 4 mixes will take you. You should be able to make 30-40 colors this way. It's really interesting to do this with say cobalt blue and ultramarine blue and compare the differences.

Making color charts as Richard Schmid suggests in his book is another way to do a similar exercise.

I'd also challenge artists to set up and paint from life anything they can find. Paint the precise color they see. Artists need to able to to capture their subjects without struggle. Practice for painters is good but few actually do it. Musicians practice so should painters.

Doing these will show you the differences between brands, what indian red will look like as compared to another companies red oxide or Mars orange-one of my favorites!