So, I am studying paints. I have a couple of dozen different colors, and it’s very handy to have a sample on hand that shows the mixture of two, or even better, three colors from this palette, in order to make fewer movements later to get the desired color. Yes, experienced artists may not need this, but I do.
And such a palette cannot be bought. Not at all. If you Google it, you find Color Wheels, Itten’s circles. But that’s not the same thing, when you are painting with real paints, not on a computer. The fact is that CYMK print colors are far from the same thing as colors from tubes. For instance, not all colors mix well with each other. The chemical composition of the paints varies, and the pigments might not be very compatible (resulting in mud — it can be used too, what color isn’t color, but it’s important to know that it will turn out this way). For example, an orange in printing is already a CMYK mix, not a pure orange pigment. It can be obtained from yellow and red, or you can use a ready-made color, which can be mixed with something else.
Beyond that, the color wheels sold on Amazon are all incorrect. For example, there is inexplicably a shade of blue lighter than BLUE-VIOLET and BLUE-GREEN in between them; moreover, the shade is such that you can’t even obtain it by mixing with added white. When mixing two colors, the mixture will never be lighter than the components. And adding white diminishes the brightness. Ultimately, it appears that one needs to think not in mixing RGB, but in mixing a couple dozen paints. And that is more complicated.
In general, I decided to create my own.
But here is the question — if I have squares of 1×1 cm, how do I dose the paint to get exactly 50:50? The internal diameter of the tube is 4mm, and it’s quite difficult to extract a little from there. Yes, you can extract it onto a palette, and measure with a palette knife. But I decided to embrace my inner engineer and make a dispenser.
I printed the dispenser on a 3D printer. It has a millimeter-sized hole, and it can extrude a thin “sausage” of the required length. I also printed caps for it. So, now this setup screws on instead of the original cap. Actually, I considered transferring all the paint into syringes, but in the end, this turned out to be simpler.
Interestingly, I wonder why paint manufacturers do not produce such a palette for sale. It would be very convenient for beginner artists. Paint manufacturers have everything needed for this. They need to mix their paints automatically in different proportions and apply them to a canvas according to the design — and you can create many such projects — color wheels, triangles, gradients, mixing white and black to each color in different proportions. Separate sets for portraits. I think there is a market for this. This process can be automated and released in small batches of Color Wheels for different sets of colors.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 