Paint Color Mixing Calculator

Free Paint Color Mixing Calculator

Find out what colour you get when you mix paints, and how much of each to use. Enter the paints on your palette with the number of parts of each, and the calculator shows the mixed colour along with the exact amount to measure out for the batch size you need. Or work backwards: name the colour you are trying to hit and get a recipe in whole parts from the paints you own.

Why not just average the colours?

Because paint mixes subtractively and screens mix additively, and the two give opposite answers. Averaging the RGB values of blue and yellow produces grey, while mixing blue and yellow paint produces green. This calculator models the painter's red-yellow-blue colour wheel instead, so the results match what happens on the palette: yellow and blue make green, red and yellow make orange, red and blue make violet, all three together make mud, colour plus white makes a tint, and colour plus black makes a shade.

Two mixing models

• Painter's wheel — for opaque paint: acrylics, oils, gouache, emulsion. Each paint is treated as a colourant plus a white load and a black load, and the colourants combine on the RYB wheel.
• Glaze / ink — for transparent layers: watercolour glazes, printing inks, coloured film. Light passes through each layer in turn, so the reflectances multiply and the result can only get darker.

Tinting strength

Equal volumes do not mean equal influence. A phthalo blue will overwhelm a titanium white far beyond its share of the mix, while an earth colour is comparatively meek. The str field scales how strongly each paint pulls the result: leave it at 1 for an ordinary paint, and raise it for the staining pigments — phthalos, dioxazine and quinacridones. Measured volumes stay based on the raw parts, because tinting strength changes the colour, not how much you pour.

How to Use

1. Load a paint set, or set each colour with the swatch or by typing a hex code.
2. Enter how many parts of each paint the mix uses.
3. Read the mixed colour, then set your batch size to see how much of each paint to measure.
4. To go the other way, switch to Match a colour, choose your target and press Find the recipe.

Accuracy and limits

This is a colour model, not a substitute for a test swatch — always mix a little and check it against your target before committing to a batch. The paint colours listed are representative starting values rather than measurements of any particular brand, because pigment appearance varies with binder, opacity and film thickness; edit them to match the tubes on your table. The red-yellow-blue wheel also cannot describe every colour a screen can show, such as a vivid cyan, and the calculator says so when that affects a mix.

Privacy and Security

We respect your privacy. This tool is a browser-based application, so every calculation happens on your own device. Nothing you enter is uploaded to our servers or stored.