A PILE THAT'S ALMOST RIGHT
The last touch
is the hard one.
Say what your pile needs. See what to add, how much, and what else it will do, before the paint goes in.
Oils · 33 paints · estimated mixtures that learn your tubes
A TRACE → AS MUCH AGAIN
one touch away.
What's in your pile
Tap a paint for each knife-load you used. Rough counts are fine.
Empty palette
Nothing mixed yet
Your paletteChange
Pick a ready-made palette or tick what's actually laid out. Suggestions only ever use these paints.
Tune it to your paints
Brands differ a lot in strength. Mix 1 part of a colour with 4 parts white and lay it beside the swatch here. If yours is clearly lighter or darker, say so. Each tap is a moderate step. It also learns when you say a suggestion went too far or not far enough.
Look at it. What does it need?
Compare your actual pile with your painting, not with the screen. Your eye is the instrument here.
Pick the colour you're after, from a swatch or a photo. Screens and cameras lie a little, so treat the match as a start.
Tap the spot you want. It averages a small patch.
THE GEOMETRY UNDERNEATHThe shape of a correction
Adding paint can only pull your pile toward that paint. Each line is the fixed path one paint would take your pile along, from a trace to twice the pile, with dots at the ladder steps. The shaded region is everything you can reach by adding up to a pile's worth of any one or two paints on your palette. It's decided before you touch the knife.
Mixing space plots each colour by the balance of what it absorbs: red light, green light or blue light. That's K/S per channel, as proportions. Mixing two paints in the model is a weighted average of those numbers, so here every route is a straight line toward its paint, and the outlined polygon is exactly every colour this palette can make. The paints' strength shows up as speed: the ladder dots bunch or stretch along the line. Value isn't shown here (adding white to a grey barely moves). That's the other maps' job.
ORDER DOESN'T MATTER
Pick two paints. Half a pile of each, in either order, follows two different routes and lands on exactly the same point. In the model's mixing space, adding paint is an average, so the order can't change the result. On these maps the routes bend; they still meet.
YOUR MIXING RECORD
The recipe you ended up with.
Corrections pile up. This writes the result as a clean recipe, so you can mix it straight next time.
Nothing yet.
MIX ENOUGH
Mix enough to finish the passage.
Running out halfway and trying to rematch is how a passage goes patchy. Tell it what you're covering and it scales the recipe to the whole job, with some to spare.
EVERY PAINT, ONE AT A TIMEWhat each paint does to this pile
Same pile, one paint at a time, from a trace up to as much again. Watch where each one overshoots.