Visual comparison and incremental addition of colorants
All manual color matching is done by visual comparison. You can tell what colorants are in a color by comparing it to 1. White and 2. Another color (or other colors - plural).
Tinting Machines
You can tint by adding a drop here or a squeeze there from a tube or squeeze bottle of universal colorlarnts. The best method is to use a tinitning machine. Most tinting machines are set up in either 32nds or 48ths of an ounce. So a typical formula might require for example: 6 - 32nds of lamp black, 4 - 32nds of thalo blue and 4 - 32nds of red oxide.
Know the color wheel and it’s (theory) workings
The Munsel Color System is the key to understanding how color relates to each other. Colors are made by blending colors (actually colorants or universal tints in the case of paints) together to form another color. See The 12 Color Wheel.
Colorants and Tinting Bases
Know your colorants (see Universal Colorarnts)
Paints are not made by adding hypothetical or theoretical colors. Paints are made by adding colorants into a paint base to form a paint color. Most of the time saturated (strong) colorants are added into a white base to form a “tint” or lighter version of the saturated universal colorant - color. A simple color would use one universal colorant, let’s say burnt umber which is a brown color, and that colorant is placed in a quantity (which varies depending on how strong the color is to be) into a can of white (base). This will produce a “tint” of brown which may be a very light bleached out beige hue “off white”. If a large quantity of burnt umber where placed into the white base , you would get a medium beige color. For a more complex color, you would use two or more colorants to make a color. Not only two or more colorants, but two or more in varying quantities of colorant. This is how paint is tinted and colors are made.
In order to make a paint color you need to know what color the colorants are. Universal colorants are not pure clean colorants. There is no pure blue universal colorant. There is ultra marine blue or Thalo blue for example, each of these colorants are “tainted” with other hues so that they are not pure blue. So when mixing colors to make a paint color you need to know that you are not mixing pure “blue” and pure “red” colors to form a pure theoretical “purple” like you might see on the color wheel. You are actually mixing the colorants (for example) of Thalo blue and burnt sienna to form a new color form these impure colorants.
Also keep in mind that the strength and color of the colorants can vary from batch to batch and from manufacture to manufacture.
Different bases
There are also different bases that colorant is added to - to achieve different colors. Adding burnt umber to a white base will bleach out the umber color to make anything from an off white to a medium beige. But, if you add the brunt umber to a clear base, you will have a deep saturated brown color, because there is no white to bleach out the saturated colorant. This is how deep tone paint colors are made. You could add the burnt umber to a yellow base and it would produce a gold color ranging from slightly gold yellow to slightly yellow brown. Paints are made by adding universal colorants to different paint bases. So that you are not totally confused, most paints are made from a white base. Most deep colors are made from a clear base. The rest of the bases you don’t need to be too concerned with.
White base / Clear base
You cannot make a deep color from a white base, the white in the base prevents this from happening. The white in the base will always bleach out the saturated color of the universal colorant. That is why there are clear bases, to make deep tones. The problem with clear bases is that they lack the hiding or coverage of the white base. The primary “hiding pigment” in paint is white (titanium dioxide). Titanium dioxide is a “blocking out” pigment, it prevents the previous paint color from showing through into your paint coating. The more titanium dioxide, the better the hide as a rule. Good hiding paints have a lot of titanium dioxide, and they cost more because titanium dioxide is expensive. Clear bases on the other hand, have no white or coloring pigments (other than the universal colorants that are added to the base to make a color). The lack of titanium dioxide (white) is why deep tone paint colors have poor hiding - even though the colors are deep and sometimes dark colors. It is not the deepness that permits hiding, it is titanium dioxide - white. When using deep tones a gray primer is usually used to aid in obtaining coverage.
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By comparing the blue on the right to white I can begin to determine against a "blank" white color, what is contained in my blue color.
By comparing the blue to another blue hue, I can see how the blues differ. The blue on the left is grayer and redder than the blue on the right. So if the blue on the right was the beginning of my attempt to match the blue on the left, I would proceed by adding more gray and red incrementally (not too much or you will over-tint the paint and need to start all over) until I arrive at a good match.
Now, I probably have enough red, but I still need to be grayer. More black to deepen the color and gray it.
Closer, still need more black. After that is added we will see if it is red enough.
Now I am close on the black (adding the black has neutralized some of the red). You can see by close comparison that I am too blue. I need a drop or two more of red.
Beautiful, close enough for the crowd I hang around with. This is how paint is matched by visual comparison and incremental addition of colorant.
How to Mix Paint Colors
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