Recipes for Gorgeous Greys

Daisies and Water
30 x 30

I've been on a technology hiatus this summer, painting, gardening, and relishing the short, intense summer - despite its hail storms and heat waves.  It's been a treat to be unplugged and to wait until the time seemed right to start looking at the computer again (yes, I actually mean Facebook, that great sucking abyss of irresistible video links and great paintings).  So I'm diving back in with a blog about greys because today is the first gray day in a long while.
There are lots of tempting tube greys on the paint display rack, but I prefer to mix my own from the primaries plus white.  That gives endless permutations and makes a livelier color space for the eye to explore.  
My palette contains warm and cool variations of each of the primaries plus a few earth colours and a selection of whites.  Here's a list of the pigments that are my mainstays.  I sometimes add a novel color like viridian, cad yellow deep, or Indian yellow, but this list shows the workhorses:
Cad red lightAlizarin permanentCad yellow mediumCad lemonUltramarine blueCerulean Hue or phthalo blueYellow ochreRaw umbertransparent red iron oxideTitanium whiteFlake white hue/replacementZinc white (to be mixed with titanium; it's too brittle to use on its own)
This list makes an endless and amazing variety of colours and those can all be used to make luminous greys.  For example, if I'm trying to make a warm, reddish grey, I would probably think of cad red light as my foundation color (alizarin if I'm making a cool, reddish grey), and explore all of the triads that it makes plus varying amounts of white to make it light enough to read the grey:
Cad red light + cad yellow med + ult blue + whitecad red light + cad lemon + ult blue + whitecad red light + yellow ochre + ult blue+ whitecad red light +cad yellow med + cerulean + whitecad red light + cad lemon + cerulean + whitecad red light + yellow ochre + cerulean + white
That's 6 different greys, just in the warm, reddish field.  I could do the same with each of the warm and cool primaries as well as the earth tones which are, themselves, just low chroma primaries.  
But that's not the only way to make gray.  Adding white to any color will automatically gray it.  Try putting some white in one of the cadmiums and you'll see how it loses its intense chroma.  This is particularly noticeable with cool, opaque titanium.
And then there are the earth pigments which, when added to high chroma pigments can also gray them. One of my favorite earth pigments for this purpose is yellow ochre.  If I have a yellow that's screaming too loudly in the painting, I'll add a bit of yellow ochre to it to dial it down a notch.  TRO mixed into cad red light will gray and darken it; adding a bit of white will give you a whole new sophisticated greyed red.  
So I avoid the whole gray section in the art store which saves me heaps of money.  And those savings can be applied to buying more brushes - my biggest weakness!
Happy painting!