I painted cars for nearly a decade. I intuitively know how various color hues are made. For instance, there are only two kinds of black. The most common is made from carbon and it is a yellow base. It will always tint a color towards yellow when added to any other base. Then there is the much more rare purple based black. Some color mixing systems do not even have a purple based black and it in impossible to hit some color matches as a result. Some special edition Harley Davidsons are too dark to hit with my old PPG mixing system. I usually kept a bit of purple black from BASF for this purpose.

Another color that would blow your mind is this one white (that is used on Toyotas IIRC). It was so bright of a white that, when I first encountered it, I tried just using my brightest white base because in my mind, there was no way that tinting was going to produce a brighter white. Almost all whites go one of three directions in tint. They are all either yellow - most common, blue - maybe 2/5ths of white cars, or red - very rare at maybe around 1 in 20 and extremely subtle. All of these are very subtle to notice but to a painter they are plainly obvious.

So this one Toyota white looked like I sprayed a blotch of grey primer even after using my brightest white. I was in trouble because a small panel job might turn into a whole side of a car to blend out a color difference like that in ways no one will see. I finally looked at the color formula from the color code and mixed an approximation of it. The formula involved a mix of odd colors, but the result was actually brighter pure white and that blew my mind. It did not tint in any tone or go darker at all but actually went brighter.

I have some of the best color vision of any other painters I encountered. This is actually how I ran my paint business. When you mix paints there is a minimum amount you’re supposed to mix to make it right. It is really about the minimum amount that can be measured and how much of the smallest amount of a color is involved. So if the formula has 1% of this one red, and the minimum I can dispense is 1 gram, I must mix 100 grams of paint in total. I may only need 50 grams, but industry standard is that ai mix 100 regardless and have to use or toss it. I don’t need to use formulas like this. I can look up the base ingredients and make the colors from scratch in smaller quantity. I also kept around 10 bottles of common base colors that I would mix together. So if I painted a silver car and had some color left over, I would put that in my silvers bottle. Then on my next job with a silver car, I would take my left over silvers bottle tint it a little bit and spray that just over my primer over the repair. Then I would mix a very tiny amount of the proper silver from scratch and use this to blend out the actual final color coat. I did things like dilute the small amounts of colors I needed in special ways like by combining it with clear binder, solvent, or one of the base colors in the formula I was replicating. This gave me access to a smaller amount than the 1 gram of red.

Painters must tint the formula for any color they mix anyways. As cars age, the color degrades for many reasons. So even when making the minimum formula, it is just a baseline for tinting. I simply flipped this paradigm and tinted everything while only using the formula as a reference. This means I spent far less on paint per job, and I could approach smaller repairs more cheaply than most people doing automotive paint. I also have hacker skills with clear coat application that make smaller repairs possible.