Love the idea of the Color Cube but don't want to spend $55? Or maybe you're tired of flipping through pages of swatches to find a matching marker or pencil for your favorite new palette?
You're not alone. Every artist who works with physical supplies — colored pencils, alcohol markers, watercolors, ink pads — eventually runs into what we call the Color Palette Gap.
What Is the Color Palette Gap?
Here's a scenario you probably know well: You find a gorgeous photo on Pinterest — a moody autumn forest, a tropical sunset, a cozy coffee shop interior. The colors are perfect. You want to recreate that palette on paper.
But then reality hits. You're staring at your collection of 72 Prismacolor pencils or Copic markers, and you have absolutely NO IDEA which ones come closest to the colors in that photo.
This is the Color Palette Gap — the disconnect between the digital colors you see on your screen and the physical art supplies sitting on your desk.
The Old Way: Expensive PDFs and Physical Charts
Until recently, artists had a few options for bridging this gap:
Physical color charts and tools like the Color Cube run anywhere from $25 to $55+. They're beautifully designed, but they're static — they only cover certain brand combinations and can't adapt to your specific photo or your specific supply collection.
Downloadable PDF color companions offer curated palettes and brand-specific blank swatches. These are helpful, but you're still limited to first preparing entire charts and then relying on whatever palettes the creator chose. If your inspiration photo doesn't match one of their pre-built combos, you're back to guessing and swatching. Believe me, I know the frustration!
Manual swatching is the free option — but it takes hours. You swatch every pencil or marker you own onto paper, photograph the swatches, and then eyeball-compare them to your reference image. It works, but it's tedious, and the results depend on your lighting, your camera, and your ability to judge color by eye. With limited time for a hobby, half the time is gone in preparation!
None of these options solve the core problem: you have a specific photo and you want to know exactly which supplies in your brand will match.
The New Way: Upload a Photo, Get Instant Matches
This is exactly why we built MyKindofColor.
Instead of buying a guide or swatching for hours, here's how it works:
1. Upload any photo — your Pinterest save, a photo from your camera roll, a screenshot from Instagram, anything. You select an area on the photo and movable color markers appear.
A vibrant tulip bouquet — exactly the kind of photo artists save on Pinterest for color inspiration.
2. The tool extracts a color palette — it pulls the dominant colors from your image area automatically. You can even move the markers to pick exactly what you want. Your palette of 6 unique colors is ready!
The extracted palette from our tulip photo — 6 colors with hex codes, ready to match to real art supplies.
3. It matches those colors to real art supplies — using Delta E 2000 color science (the same formula used in paint manufacturing and professional color calibration), it finds the closest matches across brands like Prismacolor, Copic, Ohuhu, Faber-Castell Polychromos, Holbein, Derwent, and more.
4. You see match quality ratings — each suggestion shows an Excellent, Good, Fair, or Approximate rating so you know how close the match really is.
Real results: Faber-Castell Polychromos matches for our tulip palette, each with a match quality rating and percentage.
5. You can buy supplies you're missing — direct links take you to the exact product if you need to add it to your collection.
And it's free.
Let's Walk Through a Real Example
Say you found a stunning desert sunset photo — warm oranges fading into dusty pinks and deep purples against a twilight sky.
Step 1: Save the photo and upload it to MyKindofColor. You select an area on the photo and movable color markers appear. Adjust the markers to your preference.
Step 2: The tool pulls out your palette — maybe a burnt orange, a coral pink, a dusty mauve, a deep plum, and a slate blue.
Step 3: You select your brand. Working with Prismacolor Premier pencils? The tool might suggest:
Step 4: Prefer Copic markers instead? Switch the filter — the same palette now maps to Copic codes. You can even see matches across multiple brands at once.
That entire process takes about 30 seconds.
Why Color Science Matters
You might be wondering: how is this more accurate than just eyeballing it?
Most color matching tools (and most artists doing it manually) compare colors in RGB — the way your screen displays color. But RGB isn't how human eyes perceive color differences. Two colors can look very different in RGB values but appear nearly identical to the eye, and vice versa.
MyKindofColor uses Delta E 2000, a perceptual color difference formula that accounts for how humans actually see color. It converts every color to the CIELAB color space (which maps to human vision) and then calculates the perceived difference. This is the same standard used in the paint, printing, and textile industries.
The result: when the tool says a match is "Excellent," it genuinely looks like the same color to your eyes — not just to a computer.
Who Is This For?
Try It Right Now
Head to mykindofcolor.com, upload a photo you love, and see which supplies match. No account required, no payment, no catch.
If you've been on the fence about buying an expensive color matching tool, give this a try first. You might find it does everything you need — and more, since it works with your photos, not someone else's pre-made palettes.
Let's make art easy peasy lemon-squeezy!
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MyKindofColor currently supports over 3,000 individual colors across Prismacolor, Copic, Faber-Castell Polychromos, Holbein, Derwent, Altenew, Winsor & Newton, Daniel Smith, Caran d'Ache, Tim Holtz, Sennelier, and more — with new brands added regularly.