Guides

The pages on this site answer which paint is closest. These answer whether closest is close enough, and what the number is measuring when it says so.

• How close is close enough? Every match on this site carries a number. This is what it measures, and what it cannot see.
• Substituting a paint The nearest colour is rarely the whole answer. This is the order to decide things in when the pot is discontinued, out of stock, or simply not the range you own.
• What a hex code misses Six digits record how a colour looked once, on a flat dry sample, under one light. This is everything about the pot that never reaches them.
• Contrast, Speedpaint and Xpress Three ranges sell the same trick: base coat and shadow in one pass. That trick is also why a colour distance between two of them promises less than the same number anywhere else on this site.
• Paint ranges explained A brand is not one paint. It is several different products wearing the same logo, and the range is the word that tells them apart. A colour distance cannot read it, so you have to.
• Washes and shades A wash is not painted onto a surface. It is let into the recesses, and most of it ends up somewhere you did not put it. That changes what the number beside it is comparing.
• Air ranges Air on a label answers two different questions, and only one of them is about how the paint sprays. Which one you are looking at decides what a match to it is worth.
• Metallic paints A metallic is a colour that changes with the angle you hold it at, and this site holds one number for it. Worse, the label beside that number usually does not say the pot has flake in it.
• Craft paint on miniatures Five of the ranges this site matches against are sold for decorating wood and painting canvas, not models. They are also, often enough, the closest colour to the pot you are trying to replace.
• Switching brands Citadel to Vallejo and Vallejo to Citadel look like the same chart read from either end. They are two different answers, and the gap between them decides which way is worth moving.
• How the matching works Every page here ends in a number. This is the whole path that number takes, from a sampled colour value to the word printed beside it — and what gets dropped on the way.
• Same colour, different pot A page on this site can name four ranges at once. The colour value is the same in all of them, and almost nothing else has to be.