Dropper Bot
Dropper Bot
Spectral paint recipe solver
About
For miniature painters · free to use

Your paints can mix more colours than the store can sell you.

Dropper Bot turns any target colour into drop-count recipes from the bottles you already own — simulated with real pigment physics, graded with real honesty.

Match a colour → Browse the tools
Start with what you've got — the right tool is one click away
Got a colour in mind?Mix to Match Got a photo you love?Image Sampler Got the wrong brand?Brand Cross-Ref
Three tools do most of the magic

Pick a colour in, get paints out

Every tool is the same straight line — pick, solve, mix — so there's nothing to relearn between painting sessions.

Tool 01 · the main event

Mix to Match

Name any colour — a Citadel pot, a hex, anything you can sample — and the solver searches hundreds of pigment combinations from your palette. Up to three recipes back, graded by ΔE. If your set can't reach it, you're told which single pigment would fix that.

1pick a colour2solver mixes3count your drops
Open Mix to Match →
Tool 02 · photo to palette

Image Sampler

Drop in a photo — box art, rust, a sunset — and tap the colours worth keeping. Each tap becomes a target; each target becomes a recipe. One image in, a whole colour scheme out.

1drop a photo2tap the colours3recipes for each
Open Image Sampler →
Tool 03 · speak every brand

Brand Cross-Ref

The tutorial speaks Citadel; your shelf speaks Vallejo. Pick any paint and read across to its closest matches in the brand you own — ranked by ΔE2000, how eyes actually judge colour, never by name.

1their paint2your brand3ranked matches
Open Cross-Ref →
The rest of the bench

Five more tools, same engine

Smaller jobs, two-minute workflows. Each one answers a question painters actually ask.

Mixing Palette

Dial drops per pigment; preview the mix live. A wet palette that never dries.

use it to · experiment freely Palette Rank

Mixing sets ranked by true colour coverage — with every gap explained.

use it to · buy the right set Colour Map

Your paints as a starfield: dots that sit close, look close. Spot clones and gaps.

use it to · see your collection Highlight Ladder

Base colour in; highlight-to-shadow ladder out, every rung a real paint.

use it to · plan your shading Legacy Paints

Discontinued favourite? Map it to today's closest bottle — or mix it back yourself.

use it to · resurrect old pots More incoming

New ranges and tools land as the community asks — funded by painters, not brands.

use it to · steer what's next
Signed in · synced everywhere

Teach it your shelf once

Every tool starts answering with the paints you actually own — recipes you can mix tonight, not a shopping list.

inventoryMy ShelfYour paints across commercial lines, tied to your email. mixingMy PaletteCustom single-pigment palettes of your own design. archiveMy Recipe BookSaved recipes, ready for the next batch of the same army. next upWish ListPaints you want, added from anywhere on the site.
Why trust the recipes

Paint is physics. RGB is light.

Screens mix light additively — blue plus yellow averages to grey. Paint mixes subtractively, by absorbing and scattering — blue plus yellow makes green at the wet palette. Averaging hex codes gives answers that look plausible and mix wrong.

Dropper Bot mixes every recipe as reflectance curves in Kubelka–Munk space — the physics paint manufacturers use — and grades matches with ΔE2000. When a colour genuinely can't be reached from your set, you get a straight Best Effort grade, never a pretend match.

Read the full story, and the supported palettes →