Paintpot built · not deployed
9,913 miniature paints from 31 brands. Find the closest match to a paint, a colour or a photo.
Overview
I paint miniatures as a hobby. If you are like me, from time to time you will find yourself following a tutorial and needing to use a specific color from a given brand but what if you don't have it? The usual then is trying to find that most closely matches the one you need (or mix them until you get what you need, but I'm not that good). The question is: how do I find if I already own a paint that is close enough to the one I need?
I couldn't find any online paint-matching tool that felt accurate when getting two supposedly similar paints together. Some rank by straight-line distance in RGB, which isn't how eyes see colour. Most ignore finish, so a metallic whose hex is a flat yellow-brown comes up as the best match for an ochre. So I decided to build mine and Paintpot came to be. 9,913 paints from 31 brands, merged from two open datasets, ranked by CIEDE2000, with every match gated on whether a paint is opaque, translucent or metallic.
The whole catalogue ships to the browser, 144 KB gzipped, so matching is instant and the paints you own stay in your browser. Matches are worked out when you ask, not looked up in a fixed conversion chart, so it can answer the two questions a chart can't: what's the closest paint I already own, and what's the closest my shop stocks? From there it grew a rack with a gaps view, side-by-side compare, an army scheme builder that checks the scheme holds together, and a canvas that paints the scheme onto a photo of your own model.
Key features
- Match anything, across every brand
- A paint, a hex, or a spot on a photo (sampled as a disc and averaged in linear light, because a single pixel is noise), ranked by CIEDE2000 with the number shown beside each result.
- Your paintpot rack and its gaps
- Mark what you own, filter every match to it, and see which regions of colour your shelf can't reach.
- Schemes onto a photo
- Build an army scheme, check it holds together, and draft it onto a picture of your own model before opening a pot.