TOPIC:

This is a project I've working on to consider various two-dimensional visualizations of Tamiya paint colors in an interactive tool. The initial launch offers a few basic "colormetric" ways to sort, such as the Hue/Saturation/Lightness and Red/Blue/Green color models. In addition, there's an "Order" option that arranges the paints by their numeric code. In this release, the XF, X and P{S|C} ranges overlap, but I'm working on separating them in a future revision.

(For those of you who remember my question about the un-numbered Limited Edition PS Paints , I've assigned them pseudo-numbers following PS-64, as that seems to be around when they were introduced.)

Right now, the colors are based on the hex values of the sample images Tamiya provides online. As we all know, those can be quite a bit off. So I'm going to measure as many paints as I can with a colorimeter, and let you choose between the web hex representation, the observed real-world color -- and maybe the bottle caps as well!

Check out version 1.0 of the tool here .

Nice work A few suggestions though:

- it's not immediately obvious that you can change the order of the axes, having the pointer change to the conventional pointer might help;
- I'm not sure of the value of including PC paints by default as apart from a few dregs of unpopular colours, they haven't been avaialble for many years (or add discontined to the description?);
- similar for the special edition PS paints;
- due to the way colour chips overlap in some configurations, the paint code is sometimes obscured so having that in the description popup rather than just the name mught be helpful.

This is incredibly cool and will be a very useful tool. There are so many colors and it is not always obvious what's available. I think it would be nice to have a way to filter as well. For example, sometimes I might be using a PS color on a clear body and want to know what the closest TS color for a molded part is. There are also cases in which many colors overlap. For example, one shade of blue might have a standard version, a metallic version, a pearl version, and a transparent version. They would all be indistinguishable on the chart. If I could filter for just metallics, that would allow me to zero in on a color choice.

Edit: It actually looks like the TS paints are not currently on the chart. They should be!

Well done .

I hope Tamiya makes a new color for the i20 WRC. It doesn't exist and should be a mix of PS-35, PS-30 and PS-1 in a ratio of 1:2:45

OK, added in the TS colors:

thegogglesdonot...acolor/v1/

You can toggle individual paint series on and off to see how they compare.

It's kind of interesting to consider Tamiya's paint schemata. There are a number of dimensions (material, finish, container) that are all imperfectly represented in the naming system:

Sprays:
TS = Tamiya Spray ("For Plastics")
PS = Polycarbonate Spray ("For Polycarbonate")
AS = Aircraft Spray ("For Aircraft")

Bottles:
X = Gloss Acrylic 23ml OR Enamel 10ml, which share the same numbers
XF = Flat Acrylic 23ml OR Enamel 10ml, which share the same numbers
PC = Polycarbonate 23ml (now discontinued)
LP = Lacquer Paint 23ml

Markers:
The original "Paint Marker" lineup were all enamels, allegedly color-matched precisely to the following gloss and matte acrylics:
X1, X2, X3, X5, X6, X7, X8, X11, X12, XF1, XF15, and XF86

Specifically, they claimed that "Color names and numbers of the Tamiya Paint Marker match those of Tamiya Acrylic paints, and the color toning between the two is almost perfect."

Nowadays I believe a few of these markers survive (black, silver, white) and more have been added with "Mini 4WD" branding, strangely.

Anyway, color similarity across these collections is definitely something I'm intent on building! I may wait till I have actual colorimetric readings however.

Thanks for adding the TS paints and filtering so quickly! This is really turning into an excellent tool. Out of curiosity, how would the tool represent two colors which are exactly the same shade? For example assume there is a TS and a PS in the same color. Would they appear right on top of each other?

Yeah, right now they overlap and there's no indication something's hiding behind it until you start toggling various classes of paints on or off.

This will be less of a problem when we stop relying on hex values from images on Tamiya's website and start measuring actual paint values with a colorimeter. I think the various kinds of "white" will actually be very distinct from one another then.

For measuring the X and XF paints, I'm assuming I want to take a piece of styrene plastic and apply white spray primer, then brush-paint the same number of coats for each color? There have been folks who have tackled this before, albeit for visual reference not precision measurement... see www.britmodelle...son-chart/

I just checked my database and there are five (!) colors that Tamiya represents with little hexagons whose pixels are pure red ( #ff0000 ): X-7 Red, XF-7 Flat Red, PS-34 Bright Red, TS-8 Italian Red, and TS-49 Bright Red. There's no way all of those are actually 100% pure red... so I think the revised visualization with actual color measurements will be quite interesting!

Not quite sure how to measure PC and PS paints... should I back all colors with a consistent white coat? Anyone know where I can get flat sheets of lexan?

pleonard wrote:

...

For measuring the X and XF paints, I'm assuming I want to take a piece of styrene plastic and apply white spray primer, then brush-paint the same number of coats for each color? ...

Sounds like a plan As the purpose is allowing comparisions, the main thing would be to be as consistent as you can be, and across paint types too.

pleonard wrote:

... Anyone know where I can get flat sheets of lexan?

A quick search on eBay.com found this - 1/32" (30 thou, 0.8mm) 12" x 12" sheets, that should give you 144" 1" chips for less than 10 USD