Okay, so I'm certainly not an expert at this, but thought I'd pass along a few color matching techniques I've picked up that work for me. In college I took a 2D design course where color mixing was a major part of the course. If you've never mixed a color wheel by eye, I don't recommend it. At all... One crazy project we had was we all picked commercial packaging (cereal boxes, bags of chips, etc.) and had to paint them on poster board. The catch was we had to paint the colors in their complementary equiv. Reds had to be greens, etc. Also, the instructor graded your project through a black and white camcorder. Your product's green had to be the perfect shade of red such that in the lens of the camcorder you could not tell the difference between the bag of vanity Doritos you'd picked and your reproduction. Anyway, compared to all that, touching up a pinball playfield isn't so bad.
Here is my method for matching a color. I like it, because I'm cheap, and this method wastes the least amount of paint. One other reason I like this method is because I can make more paint pretty easily days or months or years later if need be.
First I start with my handy-dandy spreadsheet (attached). I print a copy for each color I'm going to try to match, because I normally paint right on my copy.
There's nothing special about this spreadsheet, really. It's just a list of ratios sorted by %, with duplicates removed. Here is how I use this tool. First I take a wild stab at what I think the color is. In the case of pinbot red, I was guessing a single drop of red and a single drop of orange would probably nail it. On my spreadsheet that's 1
or 50% x and 50% y. In my case this was actually close enough on the first attempt that I quit right there and painted my playfield.
Pinbot's blue was actually pretty tough to figure out. I started with 1 but knew going in that was unlikely to give me a good result. I was correct. It was way too dark. Regardless, I painted that color next to 50% on my sheet. Next I tried 4, white to blue. Since I already had 1 on my palette I just mixed in 3 more drops of white and stirred. So now in just 5 drops of paint I'm already very close. I have too dark and too light. My golden ratio is somewhere in between. I ended up settling on 3:2, white to blue or 40% blue. The result is really nice.
My dark gray ended up being the most difficult color to match. In the end I used 7:5, white, black, and yellow. I don't love the idea of putting in yellow, since I'm guessing the yellow I'm seeing on the original is due to aging of the varnish or lacquer. Still, I got a perfect match out of it, so no use in complaining.
Pinbot was pretty easy, but what about those color matches that are a real pain in the neck? One trick I have used on several occasions is to break out my flatbed scanner and scan the playfield and the failed attempts directly. By using an eyedropper I can usually see what I'm missing pretty quickly. In the case of pinbot, I used the scanner when I was trying to match the light blue, but the scanner just ended up confirming for me that there wasn't a color I was missing. It can give a good piece of mind.
A couple other things worth noting. Since Vid1900 turned me on to better paints, color matching is easier. Much easier. Using those $1 craft paints, I was routinely scanning, then mixing, scanning then mixing, and the paints would normally dry out before I was even done mixing. Also, sheen has a lot to do with how a color is perceived. Don't expect to airbrush a whole section then to realize you've missed a spot and hope you can dab down some paint on a brush and have it "blend" with the sprayed area. It just won't.
Hopefully this info helps someone.
Dan
[attachment=1506660,]
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16294011/color_mixing.zip
Post edited by Curbfeeler: link to spreadsheet
Des Moines, IA
CAM00899 (Medium).jpg
Still too cold here to spray, but I plan to be ready when it warms up.
