Color Match Game

A color match game with real paint mixing

This color match game gives you a target colour, an empty bowl and five pots of paint: red, yellow, blue, white and black. Mix them the way a painter would until your colour matches the target, then pressMatch! to see your score. Unlike most online colour games, the paint here behaves like the real thing: blue and yellow make green, a drop of black dulls a colour and a lot of white turns it into a pastel. Each colour you mix is used to paint one part of a little picture, so at the end of the game you have a painting made entirely from your own mixes. It is free, runs in your browser and works on phones.

How to play

1. Choose a mode: Classic (10 colours), Daily (5 colours shared by everyone today) or Memory (each colour is shown for three seconds).
2. Study the target. Is it warm or cool? Light or dark? Bright or greyish?
3. Add paint. Tap a pot for one drop, or press and hold to pour a stream. The numbers on the pots show how much of each paint is in the bowl.
4. Adjust. Use undo (↶) to take back the last drop or the bin to start over.
5. Press Match! You see your match percentage, the colour difference and the recipe that makes the target exactly.
6. Finish the picture. After the last colour, save your painting as a PNG or copy your score to share it.

Colour mixing tips

• Find the hue first. Get the basic colour right with the three primaries (red, yellow and blue) before you touch white or black.
• Count your drops. Every target is made from whole drops, so a recipe such as 1 blue + 3 white can be hit exactly by tapping.
• Lighten with white, not yellow. Yellow makes things lighter but also warmer and greener. White keeps the hue and makes it paler.
• Black is strong. One drop of black changes a mix much more than you expect. Add it last, and only when the colour looks too bright.
• Browns are all three primaries. Equal parts red, yellow and blue make a brown; add white for beige and black for dark wood.
• Read the recipe. After each round the game shows how the target was mixed. It is the fastest way to learn colour theory.

Colour mixing cheat sheet

• Orange: red and yellow. More yellow for a sunny orange, more red for a deep orange.
• Green: blue and yellow. Two parts yellow make a fresh spring green; add a drop of black for leaves in the shade.
• Purple: red and blue, plus white to turn it into lilac or lavender.
• Pink: red with plenty of white. A touch of yellow makes it peach or salmon.
• Sky blue: one drop of blue and three to five drops of white.
• Brown and beige: equal red, yellow and blue, then white for sand or black for chocolate.
• Olive and khaki: yellow darkened with a little black.

Why the colours mix like real paint

Your screen makes colours by adding red, green and blue light, so a naive mix of blue and yellow light gives a greyish white. Paint works the other way round: each pigment absorbs part of the light and reflects the rest. This game describes every paint by how much light it reflects at 31 wavelengths from violet to deep red and mixes them with the Kubelka–Munk equations that the paint industry uses. Your match is then scored with CIEDE2000, a colour difference formula designed to follow how people actually see small differences, so 95% really does look almost identical.

Train your eye for colour

Matching colours by eye is a real skill used by painters, designers, make-up artists and decorators, and it improves quickly with practice. Play the daily set with friends and compare your squares, or switch to Memory mode to train your colour memory. If you enjoy working with colour, try hiding in plain sight in thehide and seek paint game, relax withpixel art color by number or fill in theonline coloring pages.