🧪 ColorLab
Color theory in six stops: the wheel and the Primary Rule, a live playground for what White and Black do to whichever hue you pick, the complementary-color workaround for shading without Black, why ratios (not amounts) are what make a color, a mix-your-own sandbox, and color relationships & digital translation.
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🎡 The Color Wheel & the Primary Rule
Primary colors sit evenly spaced around the wheel. Each Secondary lands exactly between the two Primaries that make it, and each Intermediate lands between a Primary and its Secondary neighbor — mixing always moves you toward whichever color you add more of. Hue is the purest form of a color — a slice of this ring, before any White or Black touches it.
☀️ The Primary Rule: Red, Yellow and Blue are the building blocks for every other color on this page. Every Secondary, Intermediate and Neutral wedge below is nothing but those three, mixed in a different ratio.
👆 Hover a wedge for a quick look — tap (or click) one to send it down to the playgrounds in steps 2 and 3.
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🌗 Tints, Shades, Tones & Greys
White and Black never change which hue you're on — only how light or dark it reads. Tap a color on the wheel above, then drag White and Black below to watch it change — the spectrum below pulls its hue from whatever you picked, and the marker on it tracks the exact mix you're dragging toward.
🚫 No Black or White paint in your kit? Step 3 shows the Complement trick for shading without Black. For a chromatic Grey (or Brown, shown here), skip White and Black entirely and mix equal parts of all three Primaries — their hues cancel each other out.
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🔄 The Complementary Trick
Every color has a complement — the hue directly opposite it on the wheel above (Red/Green, Yellow/Purple, Blue/Orange, and so on). Mix a little of a color's complement into it and, instead of a flat grey, the two hues cancel each other's brightness and settle into a muted, greyish neutral — the same trick that makes shadows look "colorful" instead of just dark. Keep adding complement past that point and it overpowers the mix entirely: you end up looking at the complement itself, not a shade of where you started. Drag the slider to slide Orange across that whole range, from the pure hue, through the muted middle, to pure Blue.
🚫 No Black paint in your kit? A small amount of complement is the workaround — enough to mute and darken the color without losing it. The marker on the spectrum above shows exactly how far you've pushed it: near the left end still reads as the original hue, the middle is the muddy "no black needed" zone, and the right end has gone all the way over to the complement.
A recipe is a ratio, not a total. 1 Red : 3 Yellow : 2 Blue mixes to the exact same color as 2 Red : 6 Yellow : 4 Blue — doubling (or halving) every ingredient by the same amount keeps the proportions identical, so the color never changes. Only changing the balance between colors changes the result.
📋 Ratio Recipes — Quick Reference
All five colors, live — the swatch below uses the exact same math the game mixes with, so it isn't limited to the named reference points above.
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🔗 Color Relationships & Digital Translation
A few more ways colors relate to each other on the wheel — then how any color on a screen translates back to drops of paint.
🖥️ The Translation Color Picker
Pick any digital color and compare its Hex code, its RGB values, and an estimated Physical Paint Recipe, side by side.