Anyone mix their own colors?

Ok, thanks for all the info everyone.

I mix my own colors using Tamiya acrylics.  I mostly build WWII stuff and my understanding is there was no such thing as a consistent color at that time.  For instance, not every Dunkelgelb paint was the same.  As long as a color looks good to me, I'm happy.

I've mixed several of my own Tamiya paints for colors that I use regularly, like Light Ghost Grey for example.  Often, I use Mr. Color as a guide since their colors are usually very close to the real thing.

Hi cbaltrin,

I use craft acrylics for most of my builds so have to mix colors frequently. I find iModelKit (an iPhone app) very useful because it allows you to pick one of the paint mfrs colors and mix other colors to match. I also use the color mixer in PhotoShop if I have a scan of the color I want/need. There are also a couple of color mixing websites (don't have URLs handy but know that Golden Paints has one). And, yes, black and white are toners - they change the hue but not the color. You might find this site useful:

http://scalemodeldb.com/paint

One way to quantize colors is to use a photo editing program.  Using the color picker tool you can read the RGB values of any color.  Paint a sample of your mix, let it dry, and scan it with your scanner. Open that image in your scanner, then examine the paint area of the image with the color picker tool.  To speed things up, you can put down several test mixes, scan an image of several blobs of different mix, and look at each blob.  Now the tricky thing is, most colors mix using subtractive colors (magenta, cyan).  So, you need to read up on color theory (lots of good articles online- try google).  I believe some of the better photo editing programs may even convert to yellow-cyan-magenta as an option.