Color Mixing Chart

Years ago I completed the color charts from Richard Schmid's Alla Prima — mixing every color on my palette against every other and painting out the results in tonal strips. When I got interested in limited palettes, I wanted to use those charts to design them: pick a handful of colors and see only the mixtures they share. I started by physically blocking out irrelevant strips, then cutting them up to rearrange them. Eventually I digitized the charts and built a tool to do it automatically — first in Java, then Python, and finally as a web app.

I still find it most useful for abstract oil sketches — laying down pure colors from a generated palette and pushing shapes around before committing to a representational idea. The advantage over intuitive mixing is that you can play with clean colors for a long time before things go muddy.

Select one or more master colors below to view their shared mixture strips.