Color Mixer

Pick colors and set how many parts of each one to take, and the result appears right away. Saved paints are added with a single click, and each further click adds one more part.

Why yellow and blue make green

Paint absorbs part of the light and reflects the rest. When paints are mixed, each one keeps absorbing its own part, so the mixture is darker and duller than the original colors. Simply averaging the on-screen codes would turn yellow and blue into gray. This tool mixes colors with the Kubelka–Munk model: each color is broken down into a reflectance spectrum, and the spectra blend the way pigments do. The model describes how paints behave on average. Real tubes from different brands paint with different strength, so a test stroke is still worth making.

Which paints to mix

On the second tab, set the target color by its code, by picking it on the palette, or by name. From the paints you have checked, the tool builds recipes of one, two, or three paints with parts for each. Next to every recipe it shows how close the mixture is to the target. Mixing can only make a color duller, so a bright shade cannot come out of drab paints: check more paints or add your own.

Mixing chart

The third tab shows what every pair of checked paints gives, in a 1:1 ratio or with one paint dominating. Clicking a cell opens that mixture in the mixer.