These notes are for anyone who wants a thorough understanding of how color and color mixing really work. They follow light into a layer of paint and back out to the eye, show why mixtures come out the way they do, and test the standard rules about color we are taught against measured paint.
No background in math is needed. Each lesson explains one idea in words, with figures computed from real paint. For anyone who wants to know more the equations sit in a fold-out box at the end of each lesson.
The data on this site is obtained from actual measurements. Golden published the reflectance of 78 of its heavy body acrylics, and Okumura, a researcher at RIT, measured 26 matching colors from Golden’s Matte Fluid line mixed with white in steps. Those measurements feed a model that computes the color of any mixture of the 26 paints, the mixtures in the figures, the examples, and the paint tools all come from it. About these notes says more about the data and the model.
The 34 lessons are meant to be read in order, starting with Part 1. The paint tools run the same model in your browser, so you can mix the 26 paints yourself. The glossary explains every term in a sentence or two.
The four parts
Mix two paints
Pick any two of the 26 paints and slide between them. Many mixing lines sag toward gray in the middle, and some pass right through it; lesson 3.1 explains why.