Color Muse costs $59 (about £45 or AU$85 converted). It’s a Bluetooth-connected sensor that shines white light on the surface of your wall. Color Muse needs just 4 millimeters of surface to measure, and it transmits the results to the Color Muse app, where you can see color values and paint match suggestions.
How to Compare and Match Paint Colors from Different Brands
A lot of artists ask me how to match their existing paint colors to the ones I recommend.
Finding equivalents to another artist’s palette of colors can be frustrating, especially if you already have lots of tubes of paints from another brand!
This quick guide gives you an easy method for doing that.
If you already have your own favorite brand of paint and you’re wondering how to choose the right colors for any of my lessons (or your other favorite artists), the following guide will help you do exactly that
Finding Matching Colors Between Brands of Artist Paint
The key to matching colors between paint brands is not the generic name given by the manufacturer.
You’ve probably noticed the poetic names printed on your tubes of watercolor. You often see names like “Phthalo”, “Quinacridone” and “Sienna”. But those fancy names are just marketing names, and they don’t really tell you anything about the exact color appearance.
The principal “color” ingredient in watercolor paint is the pigment. This is what determines the actual color of the paint.
So to figure out if you have the right colors in your existing paint collection, you need to match the PIGMENT NUMBERS.
If you look carefully on a paint manufacturer’s website, you should find a color chart where each paint color has a corresponding pigment number.
For example the number PY65 means “Pigment” / “Yellow” and “index number 65”.
Ignore the generic name on your own paints and take a peek at the label.
Labels vary from one manufacturer to another, and sometimes not all the information is available on the label itself. In this case you can usually find a complete color chart on the paint producers website.
Once you have your pigment information you can use the following chart to locate the closest matches, or even exact matches for the recommended paints.
(The color wheel below was originally produced by Bruce MacEvoy and published on his website handprint.com).
This color wheel represents the placement of the most popular paint pigments around a color wheel according to their color properties.
Use this as a guide to match your own pigment colors to the ones on the supplies list…
Example – Finding a Match
For example, the red circles on the image above show six of my recommended primary colors by Daniel Smith (see below). These represent a warm and cool version of the primary colors (yellow, red, and blue).
- Hansa Yellow Deep – Pigment number: PY65
- Lemon yellow – Pigment number: PY175
- Pyrrol scarlet – Pigment number: PR255
- Quinacridone rose – Pigment number: PV19
- French ultramarine – Pigment number: PB29
- Phthalo blue GS – Pigment number: PB15:3
Locate the pigment numbers on the color wheel. Let’s say for example you wanted to match Daniel Smith Hansa Yellow Deep with an equivalent from Winsor and Newton.
Hansa Yellow Deep uses the pigment PY65
According to the Winsor & Newton website “watercolor composition” page here, the best equivalent would be “Winsor yellow Deep” – paint number 731. This paint also uses the pigment PY65 in its formulation.
Caveats
There is one final proviso to this matching method. You may not always find an exact pigment match from one brand to another.
For example, Daniel Smith’s warm red color “Pyrrol Scarlet” uses the pigment PR255. However, Winsor and Newton do not use this pigment.
If this happens, use the color wheel to locate the closest pigment possible to your target color.
If you look at the color wheel you can see that PR255 is close to PR254, which is the pigment used by Winsor & Newton for their paint color “Windsor Red”.
“Winsor Red” would therefore be the closest warm red to Daniel Smith’s “Pyrrol Scarlet”…
Other Resources
If you want a handy way to look up pigment information for Daniel Smith’s range of colors, they have created this color map. It’s laid out in a similar way to the color wheel above, with paints arranged around an axis, with the color appearance ranging from warm to cool.
Good luck finding your paints !
Keep in mind that if you don’t have the exact matches for the paints used by another artist, just try to get the closest options possible.
After all, it’s supposed to be fun
The problem with paint
Paint doesn’t stay the same color forever. Especially in rooms with a lot of natural light, paint pigments fade over time. That perfect shade of blue you painted the living room five years ago is likely a few shades lighter today than when it was fresh. Let’s say you remember exactly what brand, color and sheen you purchased back in 2013. Good for you! Bad news is, if you touch up your wall with a fresh can of paint, it won’t look the same. That’s where a color matcher supposedly shines. Chances are it won’t be the original color, and that’s OK. The aim is to match the color to what shade the wall is now.
I tested three color sensors: the Nix Mini, Color Muse and Palette Pico. Each is a little different in hardware and app design, but they work in a similar way. You press the sensor against the wall to block out light, then the sensor uses its own light source to read the color wavelengths of the reflected light. It then translates those into digital values we’re more familiar with. Because branded apps such as Sherwin-Williams and the apps for these sensors use RGB (red, green, blue) primaries to define the colors for matching, that’s what I went with in this comparison.
Watch this: Pinpoint your paint colors with these connected sensors
01:50
The ABCs and RGBs of color value
RGB is a way of generating colors as defined by mixes of the three primaries; 0,0,0 denotes black, and in an 8-bit system 255,255,255 denotes white. For instance, pure yellow is composed of equal values of red and green, and adding increasing amounts of blue makes it increasingly lighter. RGB is an additive system, however — like you learned as a toddler, red plus blue makes purple. Paint (like all real-world colors) is reflective, not additive, so its colors don’t exactly map to RGB. The software assigns the closest color it can find. Since color sensors have varying levels of accuracy and the color reading translates the color of the paint on the wall to the not-directly-correlated RGB color scale, that’s two ways errors creep in.
The difference between a color as represented by its values in a color space and that color as displayed in the real world is referred to by color scientists as Delta E. A smaller number is better; 2 Delta E is commonly thought of as the highest the difference can be before a sharp-eyed person will notice, or the “just noticeable difference.” Here’s a table of the most common ranges:
A normally invisible difference
Very small difference, only obvious to a trained eye
Medium difference, also obvious to an untrained eye
An obvious difference
A very obvious difference
Matchmaker, matchmaker
What does all that have to do with the paint on your wall? The sensors and companion apps use Delta E to rank color matches.
Nix uses the categories “Excellent Match,” “Great Match” or “Good Match.” Color Muse uses a three-star rating to indicate matches less than 1 Delta E, a two-star rating for 1-4 Delta E and one-star for anything outside that. Pico uses similar categories with “Great Match” and “Good Match.” Colors in the excellent, great and three-star match categories are so close (or even the same just a different brand) that you’d probably never notice a difference.
If there aren’t any perfect match results, you can take the RGB values of the surface to paint stores like Sherwin-Williams, where they’ll mix the color from a Sherwin-Williams base or tint a similar color to get it just right. Before we get into results, here’s a quick rundown of each of the units I tested.
