I recieved an interesting question from a student today who wanted to find out how to colour match edge paint accurately.
Now, I've been doing this for a long time, so I go by eye using experience mostly. But that Doesn't really help anybody.
So here's an idea I used to use.
This isn't foolproof, and tweaking is always going to be necessary, but it can get you a ballpark colour match.
Find an online colour mixer that can give you the ratios you need for the colour you want. Something like this: https://trycolors.com/
Then, get yourself some syringes to accurately draw out the amount you need from each bottle of paint and deposit into a clean container.
Label each syringe by colour and don't mix them up. Wash them in warm water immediately after use, remove the plunger and allow to dry.
When you get the ideal colour match, place some down onto the leather you wish to match and let the paint dry completely. After drying, the edge paint may look slightly different., so adjust if needed.
When you have finalised the mix, keep a small notebook with your ratios logged. Perhaps even keep some swatches in it for quick reference.
I recommend the following 'colours': Black, white, brown, red, yellow, blue.
Black and white will change the tone of the finished colour. So if you created purple by mixing red and blue, you can get lilac by adding white, and plum by adding black.
I include brown because I find it's one of the harder colours to create well with the standard RYB mix.
I may make a blog post about this and expand further, so I'm looking for ideas to add.
So if you have any tips or tricks to colour matching either dyes or edge paint, please comment below and I can share them with the wider community.
I wish that the edge paint companies would have some sort of mixing system like screen printing ink companies do. The last screen printing place I worked at used the Wilflex one (doesn't matter because I think all of the major companies have a similar thing) but they had downloadable software where you looked up the Pantone color you needed and it would give you the exact formula down to 0.1g or actually 0.01g I think, and then you just weigh everything out and mix it up and you're pretty much there. Maybe they don't because we're working with much smaller amounts, but if it's going to be one color that you use regularly it would certainly be helpful especially if you don't know what you're doing. I know I certainly learned a lot about what colors are actually needed to make other colors, and how adding .5g of fluorescent blue to a color that you would think has no need for a blue actually makes a subtle change and is the little thing it needs to get it to look right. One of the other printing places I worked at didn't use inks that had a system like that so we just weighed stuff out and did it by eye and then wrote down the formula on the container for when we needed to make more of it, and that definitely works but also you have to be prepared to potentially waste the entire batch because you accidentally added too much of something like you're trying to make an orange and accidentally put too much red and no amount of yellow can bring it back because red is such a heavy color and just dominates everything.