I’m sure you know the struggle: trying to match a paint from one miniature paint range to another, only to be let down by manufacturer charts, conversion tables, and paint database apps that ALL don’t quite get it right. I’ve wasted a lot of money on mismatched paints over the course of my hobby career. So, I sat down and spent the last few years working on a solution. The result is, in my opinion, the best paint comparison tool you can get, featuring professional hand-painted swatches for the seven most popular miniature paint ranges.
I’m a massive paint nerd, but one thing has always bugged me: converting colours from one paint range to another. For example, when you want to follow a tutorial but have different paints in your collection. Or you’re thinking of making the switch from one brand to another.
Why all the other comparison tables, tools & apps don’t work
There are some websites and apps that allow you to search for specific colours and get the equivalents from other paint ranges, along with conversion charts and tables from the manufacturers themselves. And these are okayish for pointing you in the general direction. However, if you’ve tried matching colours this way you know that when you compare the real paints side by side the results are usually way off.
About colour gamuts
Let me tell you why. Often, these graphics are created for printed flyers, box art, or paint labels. Printing is done using four colours: CMYK, which stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. However, CMYK can only reproduce colours within a limited scope.


The human eye can differentiate over a million colours, and the LAB colour space is a 2D approximation of human colour perception. Then there’s RGB, which you probably know from screens and digital devices. The RGB colour space is somewhat smaller, particularly missing those vibrant colours at the fringes of the colour spectrum, such as neon or fluorescent hues. RGB also has the issue that most screen manufacturers do not accurately calibrate their displays. Finally, we have the print space CMYK, the smallest colour space of all. Reproducing bright orange and green tones is not possible, which is why some high-end photo printers add additional ink colours to expand the colour space. So when manufacturers create their graphics for print in CMYK, a lot of colour information gets lost. And if they then convert from CMYK to RGB, say to upload the graphics to their website, the colours shift again due to the conversion algorithms. Additionally, most paint companies do not use a spectrometer to read their colours; they simply estimate by eye.
Paint isn’t just a #hexcode
Moreover, you can’t truly convert a colour into a flat colour tile or an RGB hex value, as most online paint comparison tools and apps do. Paint isn’t defined by a simple alphanumeric value; paint consists of a variety of raw materials such as pigments and binders, each with different properties. The way they reflect light in a dried state, whether they have a matte or glossy finish, all of this changes the colour perception. And ultimately, we’re not painting flat canvases but three-dimensional miniatures. Light and shadow play a significant role in how we interpret colour.
The solution
Yeah, I know, this sounds so frustrating. Is there a way to achieve good matches and avoid blind buys at all? Well, I’ve been working on a solution for the past few years and now it’s finally here to share.
If you follow my YouTube channel and my Patreon, you probably know that I create hand-painted swatches for all major miniature paint ranges and keep perfecting them. And I know a lot of you guys love them! So now I combined seven of the most popular paint ranges in one interactive tool. The tool has all the colours from Citadel, Warpaints Fanatic, Vallejo Game Color, Vallejo Model Color, AK 3rd Gen, Pro Acryl, and Two Thin Coats. Over 1100 colours in total, sorted by colour families. All the yellows from all seven brands on one page, all the oranges, all the warm reds, all the cool reds, and so on, always sorted from light to dark by value, hue, and saturation.


Thanks to the navigation in the interactive document, you can jump straight to the colour you need, and there is also an helpful appendix with some advice for getting the best results.




And now comes what makes this tool so much better than all other comparison options: all samples are the actual paints, hand-painted on real plastic and professionally photographed. Thanks to the textured plasticard, you can judge the colours with light and shadow casting, and additional icons indicate the covering power of each paint.


The colours are as accurate as possible in terms of screen reproduction thanks to my professional workflow. My camera and photo lights are configured to neutral 5500K temperature, and the editing is done on a hardware-calibrated monitor. In real life, I walk the path of the graphic designer, and I have over 10 years of experience with professional colour reproduction. All samples are cleaned up by me in Photoshop and manually adjusted to the hand-painted samples under under my Redgrass R9 desk lamp by my experienced eye for maximum accuracy. Both the Redgrass R9 and R9 Solo lamps feature LEDs with a Colour Rendering Index of 97+, with 15 colours analyzed and rated instead of the usual 8 for standard CRI tests, ensuring near-perfect colour rendering.
More on the way
So avoid future mispurchases when picking paints and use the 7-in-1 colour matching tool to convert colours or simply to plan your colour schemes. And besides this document, I have more comparison charts, such as for Contrast, Speedpaint and other one-coat paint brands. You can find all of them on Patreon, and I would be glad if you would support me there with a purchase or membership, because I aim to map many more niche paint ranges in the future, as well as bringing you regular updates to my existing swatches and charts.
Stahly
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