Golden Artist Colors, the well known manufacturer of artists’ acrylic paints and related materials, has posted an interactive Virtual Paint Mixer on their website.

The module allows you to choose from their range of colors and assign three tube colors to the mixing tubes on the right (by dragging or selecting and clicking) and then by adjusting the distance of the tube tops from their tubes, interactively produce a mix of the chosen colors and percentages in the mixer area.

While onscreen computer simulations like this will always be less than accurate in comparison to the real color of paint (even if just due to the vagaries of computer systems and monitor calibration), the tool still strikes me as useful for playing with and thinking about colors and color combinations (in a way that doesn’t use up any paint).

You can store colors temporarily in boxes at the bottom and there is a drop-down under the swatches area that allows you to choose between their lines of colors. The color mixing swatch is accompanied by smaller swatches to to give an approximation of tints at various mixes of white.

You can also select a tab to choose an initial color from a gamut image or by numeric entry, and have the system find the closest mix by way of changing the paint color selections and percentages on the right. This feature strikes me as less useful, however, in that you would have to have a selection of all of their colors to use it.

The feature is new and Golden asks for feedback from users with the intention of making it better and more useful.

My thoughts were that the interface overall could be larger (the page could be considerably larger and still fit on an iPad screen), the select a color to be matched feature would be more useful you could limit the palette from which the colors are drawn (i.e. colors you have onhand) and, while I realize the addition of a fourth color would add considerable complexity, it would be nice to just have a fourth adjustable tube for white tints rather then the limited preset swatches.

It’s hard to say how far they might develop this, but it’s worth watching and participating with suggestions.

[Via Ben Stansfield]