It’s a bit like the difference between a cookie recipe vs storebought cookies. The ones from the store are reliable, always the same, but not customized to your tastes. You can make better. But if you don’t know how to bake cookies or need to reproduce the perfect cookies over and over, you’ll want to use a recipe.
The problem with packaged colors is that they are very limited. There are only a few colors, and they aren’t often the exact color that you want. Using packaged colors exclusively can be problematic when it comes to making color schemes that make sense within a single project. Frankly, the colors in most brands relate poorly to one another.
You will have more flexibility if you can learn to mix colors the way an artist does. Polymer clay is mixable just like paint colors. You can start with primary colors and mix any color you’d like. You can also use color mixing principles to modify the colors of clay you have on hand.
Be aware that you can’t take color away from a mix, so starting with mixed colors will limit what you can mix. Most prepackaged colors are mixtures. (Mixing two mixes makes a muddied color, which is why people often get frustrated with color mixing.) True primaries are necessary to be able to mix the widest range of hues.
You can learn more about color mixing with polymer clay from Joan Tayler’s excellent color mixing tutorial. It will help you learn to mix any color you’d like. (And her method will allow you to match any color you want as well.)
