Paint Colour Mixer

Pick two colours from the palette (or use the custom hex picker) and the tool returns the average of the two RGB values, which is what most paint-mixing in everyday life produces. Mix red (#FF0000) and blue (#0000FF) and you get purple (#7F007F). Mix yellow (#FFFF00) and blue (#0000FF) and you get a muddy grey-green (#7F7F7F), which surprises people raised on the 'yellow + blue = green' rule from primary school.

That surprise is the entire reason the tool exists. Subtractive colour mixing (real paint, where pigments absorb wavelengths) and additive RGB mixing (screens, where light combines) follow different rules. Online tools work in RGB because that's what your monitor speaks. The result you see is what those two colours produce on screen; in actual oil or acrylic paint, the result will be a bit different because of how pigments interact. Use this for digital design, hex code experiments and 'what would this look like' tests, not for predicting the exact shade your wall will become.

The maths is the average of the two hex codes' red, green and blue components, taken separately. Red 100 mixed with red 200 gives red 150. Same for green and blue. So #FF0000 (255, 0, 0) mixed with #0000FF (0, 0, 255) gives (127, 0, 127), which is hex #7F007F. The tool then matches the result against a list of around 30 named colours and shows you the closest one (e.g. 'Mauve', 'Olive', 'Mint').

If you want different ratios (70% red, 30% blue instead of 50/50), this tool doesn't do that. It always splits 50/50. That's a deliberate simplification: real paint mixing has hundreds of variables (white base, drying time, light source, gloss vs matte) and a tool that pretended to model all of them would be giving false precision. For weighted mixes try the [colour palette generator](/colour-palette-generator), and for digital colour work the [colour contrast checker pro](/colour-contrast-checker-pro) checks accessibility once you've picked your shades.

On screen, yellow is full red and full green light combined (#FFFF00). Blue is full blue light (#0000FF). Average those and you get half red, half green, half blue, which is grey. That's not a bug in the tool; that's how RGB averaging works. In actual paint, yellow pigment absorbs blue light and reflects green/red; blue pigment absorbs red/green and reflects blue. Mixed together, only green light gets reflected by both, so you see green.

Tools that simulate paint properly use a model called Kubelka-Munk that approximates how light bounces through layers of pigment. That model is overkill for picking a hex code. If you're a digital artist or designer, the RGB average is what you actually want, because it tells you what your screen will show. If you're a traditional painter trying to predict the exact colour of cobalt blue mixed with cadmium yellow, no tool will fully replace mixing a test patch on your palette.

Designers use this when they want a transition shade between two brand colours (e.g. mixing a logo blue with a logo green to find a midpoint for a gradient). Hobbyists use it to see what custom hex values would look like before committing them to a CSS file or a craft project. Children use it because it's a satisfying loop: pick two squares, see what comes out, repeat.

Worth saying: the tool is fully client-side. Your colour combinations don't get logged or stored. If you find a result you like, save the hex code somewhere (a text file, a Notion page, a notes app) because the tool has no save feature. For building out a full palette from one starting colour, switch to [colour palette generator](/colour-palette-generator), which takes one input and gives you four or five complementary shades.