I decided to put my new discoveries to the test tonight by matching a color that I liked, Testor's Model Master Olive Drab, but a paint texture that I hate, being very thin. In doing so, I stumbled into the Third Dimension of paint mixing.
I painted up a swab of MM OD and scanned it across the chart I made up last night (which is now almost filled out). I was a little surprised not to find a match. The closest color seemed to be 1 black:1 yellow:1 orange, but this was clearly too dark. Moving into the sections with more yellow and/or orange did not move closer to MM OD. I began to think about why.
I mentioned I had bought a color wheel. One side shows mixtures of colors, while the other side shows tints, tones and shades of colors. It doesn't define what these are or how to arrive at them. Now, I had looked these up, and the definitions were pretty straight forward. A tint of a color is the color with white mixed in, tone with grey, and shade with black. I didn't think adding black was going to get me much, so I made another little chart for varying amounts of white.
I still didn't quite hit MM OD exactly, there may still be more to the story, but 10 black:10 yellow:10 orange:5 white is pretty darn close.
This also looks like a nice way to mix up highlight colors.
Great work, Andy! I mixed up big batch just now, and I think I have an exact match with Model Masters. I emptied out the remains of an old bottle of Ceramcoat black, gave a 10 second squeeze of opaque yellow, another 10 second sqeeze of semi-opaque tangerine, a 5 second squeeze of white, and shook the whole thing vigorously for a minute. With the remains of black on the sides of the bottle, I had a pretty good olive drab, but it was a little light. I just added a little more black, shook, sampled, and repeated until it looked right. The end result was slightly darker than your 10/10/10/5 mixture, and it matches my Model Masters olive drab perfectly.
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