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Mix to Target

blend base pigments into the target colour

round
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score
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best
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target
your mix

What mixing to a target teaches

The bench holds two swatches side by side — the target colour, and whatever your current blend reads as — with one ratio slider beneath it for each base pigment, named for what it looks like rather than given a bare letter. A round is four colours: two bases to begin with, a third pigment for the last two, and a closing pair of hues so near each other that the only dependable way to separate them is by value. Every colour opens on a deliberately wrong blend, at least ΔE 12 from the target, so no colour ever opens on an accidental match.

What the drill measures is ratio judgement — not which pigments belong in a mix, but how much of each one it really takes. Sliders are relative shares, so 80/40 makes the same colour as 40/20, and the percentage beside each row reports the balance you have actually set. Mixing runs on a subtractive, pigment-style model, and every target is generated through that same model, so an exact match always exists on the sliders. After a lock-in the true ratios appear beside yours, and the Lab deltas are read back as plain direction — too light, a touch too warm.

Where the ΔE number comes from

Each colour is scored on ΔE (CIE76), the distance in Lab between your mix and the target, converted by 100 × (1 − ΔE/26). That is the whole judge — a formula, not a model, which is also why the true ratios can be printed beside yours. Below about 3 the two halves stop reading as different colours; 26 apart is worth nothing. A round's score is the mean of its four, carried live in the HUD as you work. Because the true ratios are rounded to whole percents, the correct answer always lands on a notch a hand can actually reach, which is what keeps 100 attainable; locking the opening blend without moving anything averages around 18.

More colour drills: Value Trap · Neutral Hunt · Temperature Sort · the whole catalogue