Palette

Palette is a color-mixing painting game. Instead of handing you a box of pre-made crayons, it gives you a small set of realistic artist oil paints — Titanium White, Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Red, Ultramarine Blue, Phthalo Green, Burnt Umber and Ivory Black — and asks you to mix the colors you want, exactly as you would on a real palette. Then you brush those colors straight onto a coloring page. Everything runs in your browser: there is no sign-up, no ads, nothing is uploaded, and your paintings are saved locally so you can close the tab and come back later.

How the mixing works

Real paint mixing is subtractive: each pigment absorbs part of the light that hits it, and combining pigments removes even more, which is why mixing blue and yellow gives green rather than the muddy grey you get from averaging colored light. Palette models this with a hand-tuned Kubelka-Munk engine — the same family of equations paint and textile manufacturers use to predict how pigments blend. Each tube is described by how strongly it absorbs and scatters light in the red, green and blue parts of the spectrum; when you turn up a slider you add more of that pigment's absorption to the mix, and the engine solves for the color that results. The upshot is that mixes behave like real paint: a touch of black shades a color, white tints it toward a pastel, and two complementary colors knock each other down toward a neutral grey-brown.

Challenge vs. Freeplay

In Challenge mode each picture comes with a target palette — a petal red, a leaf green, a patch of sky. Pick a target and nudge the pigment sliders until your mixed swatch matches it. Palette grades the match using Delta E (CIEDE2000), the industry-standard measure of how different two colors look to the human eye. A Delta E under about 4 is close enough that most people can't tell the two colors apart, so that's the threshold for a “match.” Bank each color you match into your tray, then paint with them. In Freeplay mode there are no targets and no scoring — just mix whatever you like and paint freely.

Painting

The picture is line art laid over a paint layer, so your brush strokes fill in behind the outlines just like coloring inside the lines (though nothing stops you from painting outside them). Adjust the brush size for broad fills or fine detail, and lower the flow to build up translucent, watercolor-like layers. Every color you bank appears in a palette tray; tap one to load it back onto the brush. Undo reverses your last stroke, and your painting autosaves as you go — reload the page and it picks up exactly where you left off.

Tips for matching tricky colors

• Start from the closest pure pigment, then adjust. Chasing a green? Begin with Phthalo Green and warm it with a little Cadmium Yellow rather than trying to build it from blue and yellow alone.
• Lighten with white last. Get the hue right at full strength first, then add Titanium White to reach the target lightness — adding white early makes the hue hard to read.
• Use complements to mute, not black. To dull a color without deadening it, add a little of its opposite (a touch of red into green) instead of reaching for black.
• Watch the Delta E number, not just the swatches. Two colors can look close but read as different under the metric — small slider tweaks that drop Delta E below 4 are what count.