My all purpose transparent pigment based palette is:

PY129 Azo Green
PY110 Indian Yellow
PR101 Transparent Oxide Red
PV19 Quinacridone Rose
PB27 Prussian Blue
PW6/4 Titanium White

To make black just mix transparent colors to get a deep dark. Add in an opaque of your favorite colors to give you some variety if you like, glaze for vibrant colors over lighter tints of colors if you want high chroma. Mix the green and yellow to get a middle yellow if needed, mix the blue and green to get a more emerald green if you need, add white to anything to give opacity. So on and so on.

My full palette includes a lot of other colors, usually used to supplement in some out of gamut opaques when I need to paint more directly (for faster finishes for client work). For general painting, this is an inexpensive and versatile, if a bit slightly different, basic palette.

You have a number of colors you can swap in though, like bringing in Ultramarine instead of Prussian (sacrifices some green range), or using an opaque red instead of PR101 Transparent. These are just bringing things to tastes though.

I am sure many others will be along shortly with more standard palette colors choices as well. So pick the one that appeals to you and give it a try. Good luck!

Bill’s suggested palette is a good one; very straight-forward and covers darn near anything. The only color I might add to it would be a blue leaning green like Viridian or Phthalo, or a green leaning blue like Phthalo blue. These would make your life a little easier if you have a need for lots of cyan/aqua.

If your painting style likes palette harmony, be sure to consider how well the modern organics that are catching your eye play with the natural inorganics you probably used to painted with.

Maybe start back up with a limited earth palette using natural oxides and earths. Bone black, Red Ochre (PR102), Yellow Ochre (PY43), Raw Umber (PBr7), White. If you like landscapes, add Green Earth (PG23). You’d also need a blue for lanscapes and blue can be trick to harmonize with natural earths. Some people like a Blue Ochre (Rubalev) which harmonizes much better than any synthetic blue.

Short of that, if you want a basic synthetic palette, a mars equivelent would be something like Mars Black, Mars Yellow (PY42), Mars Red (PR101), Ultramarine (PB29), White … and perhaps a convenience green if you don’t want to mix one.

I would also add that, apart from Blue Ochre, both of these options are all price level 1 colors and will not break the bank like cads, etc. Not sure if that’s a factor.

Bill’s a great painter and, I’m sure, a great teacher. If he will forgive my impudence, I don’t see how you can get to purple or violet with just those colors.

Ultramarine is close enough to a “true” blue, capable of mixes that tend toward both green and purple. But in my experience, cad red and Ultramarine blue never make a satisfactory purple.

I would say that even the most impoverished student should acquire a cool, dark red. Maybe a quin. (Don’t we all have a PV19 somewhere in our collection?) Or any one of the Alizarin Crimson substitutes.

Believe me, my heart is with those beset by Empty Wallet Syndrome. God knows I’ve been there! But no matter how tight the budget, a dark cool red is semi-mandatory in my book.

My PR177 is from the Blick Studio line, probably manufactured by Georgian. This is nobody’s idea of snob paint. But: Good enough, and it cost only a few dollars. Even in a student line, PR177 is a powerful pigment.

I also consider Prussian Blue semi-mandatory. Even the cheapest Prussian is better than none. You may by able to do without a tube of black, since Prussian Blue and Umber make for a very useful black substitute.

I agree with most of Bill’s colors, but to give more variety with just a few less and a few more I would do the following (similar to JCannon suggestions as well).

Cut the Ivory Black and Burnt Umber because they can be mixed using various combinations of the remaining colors and the suggested additions:

Ultramarine Blue
Cadmium Red (Naphthol Red is a good Cheaper, safer, substitute)
Cadmium Yellow (pale close to a real un-mixable yellow)
Titanium White

Add the following:

Pthalo Blue (strong blue for mixing greens and purples, good glaze color)
Alizarin Crimson ‘Hue’ (‘Hue’ is more permanent then real alizarin Crimson)
Burnt Sienna (a good underpainting color for landscapes.)
Hooker’s Green*

*The hooker’s green could be optional, but is a good mixing color to get blacks and browns and makes a good shadow color for trees in landscapes. It’s also more transparent than a mixed green for glazing.

It probably would be helpful if you mentioned whether you plan to focus on any subject. Portraits, for instance, might require different hues than landscapes. Anyway, this is the simple warm/cool limited palette that was recommended to me as a beginner, made of the following single pigment paints (see also the notes below):

Cad Yellow Light (cool yellow and with a touch of cad red can be warm yellow too)
Cad Red Light (warm red)
Alizarin Crimson (cool red)
Pthalo Blue (Green shade, PB15:3) (warm blue)
Ultramarine Blue (cool blue)
Raw Umber
Yellow Ochre

+Titanium White

FYI, now what I tend to do is construct a limited palette for each painting with paints specifically selected for my subject and plan for the painting. This isn’t something a beginner would want to do though.

Notes:
I later found that other hues were needed and added or substituted these:

[*] Substituted one of the Permanent Alizarins that are lightfast (Gamblin, W&N are good choices)
[*] Cobalt or Cerulean Blue as substitutes for the Pthalo Blue*
[*] Dioxazine violet (very strong tinter (almost as strong as pthalos) and dries very slowly) or Ultramarine Violet (weak tinter, also dries slow but not as slow as dioxazine) or Quinacridone Violet (stronger tinter) as an added violet (all of these are transparent
[*] You can also find substitutes for the cadmium hues if their toxicity is a worry for you.

Single pigment paints are preferred by many painters because paints using many different pigments are thought to be less chromatic, and harder to handle. It depends again on your subject – sometimes a less chromatic paint isn’t an issue.

* If you decide to use it, you will probably find, as most everyone does, that Pthalo blue is incredibly strong and its way too easy to let it inadvertently contaminate other mixtures. However, the problem with the two substitute blues is that they’re naturally lighter in value so which blue to use depends on what you’re painting. When a darker warm blue is needed, substituting Prussian (somewhat darker value) can work, as mentioned above, but I found that as a super fast drying paint it was very hard to handle for a beginner.

I’m one of those painters who avoids black paint. If a very dark hue is needed, using raw umber generally will work, or one can mix a chromatic black that leans in one direction or another (warm/cool). A good formula for a chromatic black is pthalo green + alizarin red (or any of the substitute alizarins), but again that will create a very strongly tinting paint. You can mix chromatic black from just about any pair of complementary colors, or from any three paints equidistant from one another on the color wheel (eg yellow+red+blue.)

My current goal is to find a way to replace the burnt umber because, as many of the earth colors do, it dries very fast – sometimes it dries on my palette during a long painting session(!) and it also tends to sink in. There’s always something…

Bill’s a great painter and, I’m sure, a great teacher. If he will forgive my impudence, I don’t see how you can get to purple or violet with just those colors.

Ultramarine is close enough to a “true” blue, capable of mixes that tend toward both green and purple. But in my experience, cad red and Ultramarine blue never make a satisfactory purple.

I would say that even the most impoverished student should acquire a cool, dark red. Maybe a quin. (Don’t we all have a PV19 somewhere in our collection?) Or any one of the Alizarin Crimson substitutes.

Believe me, my heart is with those beset by Empty Wallet Syndrome. God knows I’ve been there! But no matter how tight the budget, a dark cool red is semi-mandatory in my book.

My PR177 is from the Blick Studio line, probably manufactured by Georgian. This is nobody’s idea of snob paint. But: [I]Good enough[/I], and it cost only a few dollars. Even in a student line, PR177 is a powerful pigment.

I also consider Prussian Blue semi-mandatory. Even the cheapest Prussian is better than none. You may by able to do without a tube of black, since Prussian Blue and Umber make for a very useful black substitute.

You are absolutely correct, regarding the inability of this palette to create a clean Violet, or Purple! That is the chief failing of this palette. However, for the goal of painting landscapes, as we did in my class, this was seldom necessary. Plus, the really “dirty”, grayed Purple that Ultramarine Blue and Cadmium Red created were usually quite appropriate for most landscape paintings.

The two colors that I would add to this limited palette would be the two that some others have mentioned: namely, Thalo Blue, and some sort of Magenta-ish color, such as that which you have mentioned, PV19 (usually called some sort of “Rose”.