Color Mixing Guide: How to Mix Any Color

Primary Colors: RGB Is for Light, RYB Is for Paint

Most people learn that the primary colors are red, green and blue (RGB). That is true for light: every pixel on your phone or monitor is made of tiny red, green and blue lights. Light mixing is additive, so the more light you add, the brighter it gets. Red + green light = yellow, and all three together = white.

Paint works the other way round. Pigments absorb light, so mixing is subtractive: every paint you add removes more light and the mix gets darker and duller. Painters use red, yellow and blue (RYB) as primaries, and printers use the closely related cyan, magenta and yellow (CMY). Mix all three paint primaries and you get a dark brown, not white.

The Toon Tone Color Match game mixes like paint. You get five paints and add them drop by drop. That is why RGB intuition can mislead you: on a screen you would make yellow from red and green, but in Color Match there is no green tube. Yellow comes straight from Sun Yellow, and green is something you make from yellow and blue.

Secondary and Tertiary Colors

Mix two primaries in equal parts to get a secondary color: orange, green and purple. Mix them 2:1 to get a tertiary color that leans toward the stronger side. These twelve colors are the backbone of every color you will mix, and the Warm-up levels of Color Match use only these two-paint mixes.

Tints, Shades and Muted Tones

Once you have the right hue, three moves change how it looks without changing its color family.

How to Match Any Color, Step by Step

Use this method on every level of the match the color game. It turns guessing into a short checklist.

1. 1

   Name the hue family

   Ignore how light or dark the target is and ask which color-wheel family it belongs to: red, orange, yellow, green, blue or purple. Brown is a dark, muted orange; pink is a light red; navy is a dark blue.

2. 2

   Pick the two nearest primaries

   Every hue sits between two of the three paint primaries. Orange and brown live between red and yellow, greens between yellow and blue, purples and pinks between red and blue.

3. 3

   Set the ratio

   Start 1:1, then move to 2:1 or 3:1 toward the primary the target leans to. Only the ratio matters: 2 yellow + 1 blue is the same color as 4 yellow + 2 blue.

4. 4

   Fix lightness with white or black

   Too dark? Add Snow White one drop at a time. Too bright or light? Add a single drop of Ink Black, which is much stronger than white.

5. 5

   Mute it with the complement

   If your mix is the right hue but too vivid, add one drop of the opposite color: blue for oranges and browns, red for greens, yellow for purples. This pulls the color toward brown or gray.

6. 6

   Check, then fine-tune

   Press Check match. Below 90%? Use Undo to step back one drop instead of starting over, and change one paint at a time so you can see what each drop does.

Think in ratios, not totals

Color Match only cares about the ratio between paints. 2 Yellow + 1 Blue and 4 Yellow + 2 Blue score 100% against each other, because they are the same color. Small ratio changes matter a lot, though: 1:1 red and yellow is orange (#FF8000), while 2:1 is red-orange (#FF4000). They only match each other at 72%, well under the 90% you need to pass.

Black is strong: one drop at a time

One drop of black in 5 drops of green already gives a deep green, and one drop in 3 gives forest green. Add black last, a single drop at a time, and hit Undo if you overshoot. You can also dilute an over-dark mix by adding more of the colored paints instead.

Tips for each difficulty level

Still stuck? The hint button shows which paints the target uses (your best score drops to 2 stars), and Undo removes just the last drop.

Color Mixing Recipes for Common Colors

Drop recipes for popular colors using only Cherry Red, Sun Yellow, Ocean Blue, Snow White and Ink Black. The keys column is the keyboard shortcut sequence in Color Match (1 Red, 2 Yellow, 3 Blue, 4 White, 5 Black). Game targets are random, so use these as starting points and fine-tune the ratio.

From Paint Mix to RGB and Hex Codes

If you think in RGB or hex, here is how the two worlds connect. Color Match mixes the paints in RYB, then converts the result to an RGB color for your screen. So each recipe has an exact hex code, but you cannot reach it by adding red, green and blue light. A few things to notice:

• Paint red and paint yellow are close to screen red #FF0000 and yellow #FFFF00, but paint blue is a deeper ocean blue (#2A5F99), not #0000FF.
• Green (#00A833) has almost no red channel: the yellow and blue pigments together cancel red light.
• White moves every RGB channel up toward 255 in equal steps; black moves every channel down toward 0. That is why tints keep their hue.
• To reach a hex code you have in mind, convert it to a hue family first (is it an orange, a blue?), then follow the method above.

Prefer working with hue, saturation and brightness directly? The original Toon Tone color guessing game lets you rebuild cartoon character colors with HSB sliders, a different way to train the same color eye. The HSB & RGB color guide explains screen colors, hex codes and the hue wheel.

Color Mixing FAQ