Substituting a paint: choosing a replacement that survives the model

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.

There are three ways people arrive at this problem, and they all look the same from the outside. The pot is discontinued. The pot exists but the shop is out of it, or it ships from another country for more than the paint costs. Or the recipe you are following was written in a range you do not own and have no intention of buying. In all three cases you need a different pot to do the same job, and in all three cases the mistake is the same: opening the list of nearest colours first and picking from the top.

The list is a ranking of candidates. It is not a decision. This is the order to decide things in.

1. Name the job the pot is doing

A paint in a recipe is never just a colour. It is a colour in a role, and the role decides both how much error you can absorb and which properties other than colour have to carry over. Before anything else, write down which of these you are replacing:

• A base coat that gets covered. Something goes over it — a wash, a glaze, a contrast-style paint, a drybrush. Most of the final colour is the layer on top.
• A mid-tone that has to accept its own highlight. The substitute has to sit under paints you are keeping, so it is being judged against them, not against the original pot.
• An edge highlight or a blend step. It shares an edge with a colour already on the model. This is the strict case.
• A single flat area, alone. A cloak, a hull, a robe with nothing to compare it to.
• A touch-up on a finished model. The original is on the model, next to the repair, under the same light. The hardest case there is.
• A whole army's signature colour. The one case where the reference lives in the viewer's head and future you has to match it again in a year.

The last one deserves its own warning. If the pot is the colour of a faction you will keep painting, the property that matters most is not how close the match is — it is whether the substitute will still be on a shelf when you buy the next box. A slightly worse match from a range that is widely stocked beats a perfect match you can only buy once.

2. Set the tolerance before you open the list

Decide what counts as close enough from the role, and decide it before you see the candidates. Read a list first and you will find yourself justifying whatever came out on top — the number is convincing in a way it has not earned. A base coat under a wash can take a great deal of drift. A highlight over its own base can take almost none. What ΔE means at the workbench has the brackets and where each one holds.

Write the tolerance down as a bracket, not a decimal: "anything under 3 is fine here". Then everything inside that bracket is a tie, and the tie gets broken on the things the colour distance never saw.

3. Look inside the same range first

This is the step most people skip, and for a discontinued paint it is usually the answer.

Every paint page here ends with a block of the nearest colours inside the same brand, and it is there for this exact moment. A neighbour from the same range at ΔE 2 is very often a better substitute than a ΔE 0.8 match from somewhere else, because colour is the only variable that moved. The medium is the same. The binder, the pigment load, how far it thins before it breaks, how it behaves over the primer you use, whether it dries matte or satin, how it takes a wash — all of it stays put. You are changing one thing instead of six.

It also survives contact with reality: it is sold in the shop you already order from, next to the rest of the recipe, at a price you already know.

When a manufacturer retires a colour it very often has something adjacent still in production, and adjacent is what you want. Check the same-brand block before you cross a brand boundary, and only cross it if nothing in the range lands inside your bracket.

4. Then cross brands — and check the kind of paint, not just the colour

Once you leave the range, the colour distance is doing less of the work than it looks like it is. Two pots can share a hex value and be unusable as substitutes for each other, because they are not the same kind of paint:

• Opaque acrylics cover. If the job was "cover the primer in two thin coats", the substitute has to do that too, and a match that needs four coats has quietly changed your recipe.
• One-coat, high-flow paints — the contrast, speedpaint and xpress-style ranges — are formulated to pool in the recesses and thin out on the raised areas. Dropped into a base-coat slot they will not give you a flat field, and dropped into a highlight slot they will run off it. Swapping one of them for another has its own rules, because the undercoat is part of the colour.
• Shades and washes are built to flow into the recesses and stain. A shade whose colour sits closest to your target is not a replacement for a paint that has to sit on a surface — and the reverse trap is worse, because a wash's own recorded colour is a less reliable number than any other on this site.
• Metallics are the case where the ranking is least able to help you, because a silver sampled flat-on is a light grey and the list will happily hand you one — or hand a silver to someone who asked for a grey. Why the nearest colour to a metallic is usually a flat paint, and how to tell which rows have flake in them when the label does not say.
• Craft and fine-art acrylics — FolkArt, Apple Barrel, Golden, Liquitex, Arteza — are matched here alongside the miniature ranges, and they win a match more often than most people expect. The bottle is real paint and it is a different product class, formulated for wood, canvas and decoration rather than for thin coats over primer at 28mm. Where a craft bottle is the right answer and where it is not.
• Air ranges are the same idea thinned for a spray. Brushing them works, but it is more coats, and the colour you get on the model after those coats is the thing you are actually comparing. When the Air pot is and is not the same colour as the brush one.
• Metallics, fluorescents and anything that shifts with the viewing angle cannot be summarised by one colour value at all. Treat any match involving them as a shortlist entry, never as a decision.

The rule of thumb: match like for like first. Base to base, wash to wash, one-coat to one-coat. Cross those lines deliberately, knowing what you are trading, not because the ranking put a number at the top. Paint ranges explained sets out which label means which of these in the brands this site carries, and what a hex code misses goes through each of these properties and what it does to a match.

5. If you are converting a whole recipe, invert the search

Looking up eight paints one at a time is the slow way to do this, and it produces eight answers from eight different ranges. If the real problem is that the tutorial is in one brand and your shelf is another, open the conversion chart for that pair of brands instead. It answers the whole recipe in one direction, out of one range, so the substitutes stay consistent with each other — which matters more than any individual match, because the model will be judged on how its colours relate, not on how each one compares to a pot you never owned. One direction is the operative phrase: the same two ranges answer each other by different amounts, and if you are weighing up a move rather than a single recipe, that gap is the number to decide on.

If what you have is a colour rather than a paint name — a photo, a logo, a colour picked off a box art — search by hex code and start from there.

6. Test it before you commit the model to it

Everything above narrows the field. It does not settle the question, and nothing on a screen can. Paint the candidate on a scrap with the same primer you use, the same number of coats you actually apply, and let it dry completely — acrylics shift as they cure, and a wet comparison is not the comparison you care about. Then look at it under the light you paint under.

If you are matching against a model that already exists, hold them in the same frame. Do not compare a pot in your hand against a photograph on your phone: a camera adjusts its white balance to whatever is in front of it, so two shots taken minutes apart can disagree about a colour that never moved.

When nothing is close enough

Sometimes the bracket comes up empty. Three moves, in the order worth trying:

1. Move the whole recipe. If the base coat has to shift, the highlight and the shade can shift with it. The eye reads the relationship between the layers far more than the absolute value of any one of them, so a coherent set that is two steps off looks right, and one corrected layer inside four original ones does not.
2. Put the compromise where it is covered. If one slot has to absorb the error, make it the one under the wash, not the one on the edge.
3. Mix it. The last resort, because a mixed colour is only reproducible if you write down the ratio and can still buy both parents. If you go this way, mix enough for the whole unit in one go, and note what went into it on the model's base.

The number ranks the candidates. The job picks the winner. Start from the range you are replacing, decide what the pot has to do, and let the list argue for itself from inside the bracket you set.

Put it to work: find a paint from a hex code, open a conversion chart, or browse every range.