Pick a color
Choose from the palette, type a hex code, or photograph something you like and pick the color off the photo.
Target color
Milk Tea
#C98F7A
White72.4g
Yellow21.3g
Red4.9g
Blue1.4g
Total100.0g
See all five worked out
| Target color | White | Yellow | Red | Blue | Black | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Milk Tea #C98F7A | 72.4 | 21.3 | 4.9 | 1.4 | — | 100.0 |
| Dusty Blue #8FA3B0 | 86.6 | 2.9 | 1.4 | 9.1 | — | 100.0 |
| Sage #9CAE8B | 73.6 | 19.5 | 0.9 | 6.0 | — | 100.0 |
| Rosewood #9E5B58 | 6.5 | 24.7 | 65.5 | — | 3.5 | 100.2 |
| Mauve #A08C99 | 87.9 | 0.9 | 5.1 | 6.1 | — | 100.0 |
Why five is enough
A 48-pack has 48 colors.
None of them is yours.
The dusty rose you pictured, the cream apricot, the muted sage — chances are none of them is in the box. So you order another pack, and the drawer fills up with blocks you used once.
Color isn't something you buy, it's something you mix. Red, yellow, blue, black and white already contain everything in between. What's missing was never a color — it's how many grams of each.
That's the one thing this app does: you give it a color, it gives you the grams.
The animation moves through three states: the 48 colors a pack gives you — bright, unrelated, and never quite the shade you pictured; the five you actually need; and the 48 you can mix from those five, which are the soft in-between shades no pack sells.
Backwards, on purpose
Mixing tools run forward.
This one runs backward.
Most color tools answer a single question: given these pigments in these proportions, what color results? That is the more direct of the two directions, and it is not the one most people need. The target color is already known; its composition is not.
The reverse is a different class of problem. Predicting a color from a known mixture is a direct calculation. Deriving a mixture from a target color is an inverse problem — it has to be solved for rather than computed, and more than one combination can fall close to the same shade.
Clay Mixer runs in this direction: given a target color, it returns how many grams of each of the five clays to use. The mixing model is Kubelka–Munk, the standard description of how opaque pigments combine, in use since the 1930s. Clay absorbs and scatters light rather than emitting it, which is why mixing clay does not follow the rules that govern mixing light on a screen.
A mixing chart
A ratio
the resulting color
Clay Mixer
A target color
grams of each
How it works
Tell it what clay you have
Common clays are built in and ready to use. If your block runs warm or cool, photograph it and the app recalibrates to that block.
Weigh it out
Down to 0.1 g. Need more or less? Change the batch size and the recipe rescales. Save the ones that worked.
What it handles for you
Grams, not parts
"Three parts red to one part yellow" still leaves you doing math at the table. This gives you 21.3 g of yellow and 4.9 g of red. Put it on the scale.
It knows your block
Brands differ, batches differ. Take one photo and the recipe is calculated for the clay in front of you, not somebody else's.
A recipe book
Save the colors you got right. Next time you just look them up instead of starting over.
Works offline
The math runs on your phone. No signal needed, no account, and your recipe book never leaves the device.
FAQ
How do I work out the ratio to mix a specific color in clay?
The ratio is derived from the color rather than arrived at by trial. Any shade reachable with polymer or air-dry clay is some proportion of red, yellow, blue, black and white; the difficulty is that clay is opaque, so the result depends on how each pigment absorbs and scatters light rather than on averaging color values. Clay Mixer takes a target color and solves for how many grams of each of the five to weigh out, at a batch size you choose.
Why can't I match the color I pictured, even with a big set of clay?
Most sets consist of saturated colors, while the shades most often wanted are muted ones — greyed, or sitting between two named colors. A shade that cannot be found in a set is usually not a missing pigment but a missing proportion.
How many clay colors do I actually need to buy?
Five: red, yellow, blue, black and white. Between them they mix most of what's in between, including the muted shades you can't buy in a pack. The hard part was never owning the color — it's knowing how many grams of each, which is what the app works out.
Why doesn't the mixed color match what I saw on screen?
Screens emit light and clay reflects it, so the two never line up perfectly — and brands vary on top of that. The app lets you photograph the clay you actually own, and from then on the recipes are calculated for your block rather than for a standard swatch.
Does it work with polymer clay, air-dry clay and resin clay?
Yes. Common clays are built in, and if your brand isn't listed — or the new batch looks different from the last one — a single photo turns it into your own set of parameters.
Is it free? Does it need an internet connection?
Free to download, with the core features fully usable. No account, no connection required — everything is calculated on the device and your recipes stay there.
The grams look oddly precise. Do I have to be that exact?
No. Recipes are shown for a 100 g batch and rescale to any size you like. For small pieces, rounding to the nearest gram is fine — the 0.1 g precision is there for when you want it. Weighing, kneading and rolling by hand shift the finished color slightly on their own, so past a point the extra decimal doesn't survive contact with the table.
Stop mixing by trial and error.
Give it a color. Get a recipe.