Hi Stuart, there are some paint sets available from Vallejo, and I think from Andrea as well, geared toward a specific subject like WWII Germans. A lot of hobbyists that use hobby paints like these tend to use a fairly restricted set of paint colours to mix common shades like Field Grey (starting with the supplied colour) to make mixing easier and help with consistency. But if you practice, read posts and articles and make notes you'll quickly pick up how to mix things for yourself. For example with Field Grey it's basically a greyish green right? So you can just mix a grey, mix a green and then blend them together and get what you're looking for, but you can also mix it from a green, red or a red-brown and a little white and get much the same result.
With oils there are no convenience uniform shades of course so you have to mix practically everything; even for something like a bright parade uniform - blue, red or whatever - you won't generally use a tube paint straight without modifying the colour slightly.
If you do a quick search here on palettes you'll see that there are a lot of personal opinions and one person's must-have colour won't even be in another guy's set. Two colours that would be considered essential by almost everyone will be white and black; I'd go for a really good brand of Titanium White as you'll appreciate the pigment load (which governs how well a paint covers) over time and it's one of the cheapest pigments so you won't pay too much for it even in an expensive brand. I'd recommend Mars Black if you're only going to have a single black paint as it's the most opaque black pigment as a rule but a lot of painters like Lamp Black too which is relatively transparent but still covers well in a good brand. I'd avoid Ivory Black if I were you.
As for the rest of the palette it's hard to suggest one you'll be comfortable with if you don't have any experience mixing - and it's not the easiest subject by any means. You'll find my recommended basic palette in a couple of places here when you do a search. You can however paint quite well with just a white and black with a yellow, red and blue, much like Shep Paine recommends in one or two of his books. If you decide to try this I'd suggest Cadmium Yellow Medium, Cadmium Red Medium and Ultramarine Blue or French Ultramarine.
Einion
