Pigment Lab

Match the target swatch by loading paint into your palette. More of a pigment darkens and shifts the hue, so getting close is about ratios, not just colours.

• Load red, yellow, and blue (and other tubes), red+yellow makes orange, yellow+blue green, red+blue purple.
• Tubes have limited paint, so spend it deliberately.
• Rinse the brush to clear residue; a dirty brush adds leftover paint to your next dab.
• Submit your mix when it's close enough; fewer attempts and tighter matches score higher.

• Desktop: click tubes to load, click Rinse, Clear palette, and Submit mix.
• Phone & tablet: tap tubes and buttons, fully touch-enabled.

• Rinse before switching toward a very different hue, or residue will throw the match off.
• Nudge with small amounts near the end, one extra dab can over-darken a close mix.

Pigment Lab teaches real subtractive paint mixing, hue, value and the messiness of a working brush.

• Skills: colour mixing, hue and value, painting fundamentals
• Best for: roughly grades 4–12 (ages 9+)
• For parents & teachers: real paint-mixing fundamentals.

Matching a target swatch by loading pigments, where more of a pigment both darkens and shifts the hue, is subtractive colour with real paint behaviour.

Making it about ratios rather than about picking colours is the original emphasis.

That coupling is what makes mixing hard in practice. A pigment cannot be added without changing value as well as hue, so matching a light tint means finding the ratio before the mixture goes muddy — which is why painters mix toward a target rather than at it.

Pigment Lab teaches real subtractive paint mixing, hue, value, and the messiness of a working brush, as a daily match puzzle. It is an original, free browser game built in-house.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.