Same colour, different pot: when one paint is sold in several ranges

A page on this site can name four ranges at once. The colour value is the same in all of them, and almost nothing else has to be.

Open Citadel Balor Brown and the line under the name reads Citadel · Air / Layer. That is two products. One page, one colour value, one ΔE against everything else on this site — and two pots you could pick up in a shop, at two prices, for two different jobs. 294 pages here name more than one range that way.

Nothing on the page tells you which of them to buy. This does.

Why one page carries two labels

Makers sell the same colour in more than one line, and when the recorded values are identical this site publishes one page instead of two. That is a deliberate rule with its own reasons — two pages of one colour offer each other as an equivalent at ΔE 0.0, which answers nothing — and the guide to the method covers the mechanics of it.

What matters at the bench is the consequence. The header lists every label the colour ships under, and that is where the site's help ends. The number beside a colour is a number about a colour. Which pot that colour arrives in is a separate question, and the answer changes what you can do with it.

Which colours the makers sell more than once

Grouped by the exact set of labels the page ends up carrying, counted by the build that wrote the pages:

Read down the middle column and the table is not really about duplication. It is a list of the ways a maker can sell you the same colour and mean something different by it.

Four things that differ behind one number

Thinned for a different tool. Citadel's Air pots, Vallejo's Game Air, The Army Painter's Warpaints Air: the same colour, carried thinner, so it will pass an airbrush needle without being cut first. Brushed straight from the bottle an airbrush paint goes on streaky and translucent, and the brush pot loaded into an airbrush is the reason people take airbrushes apart. What Air means on a label is not always even that, which is a guide of its own.

Built to a different body. Golden's Fluid, High Flow, Heavy Body and OPEN lines are the clearest case of it, because for a fine-art maker consistency is the product. Heavy Body holds a brush mark; High Flow behaves like ink and will run into every panel line you own; OPEN stays workable for far longer than an acrylic has any business staying workable. Same pigment, four tools. One colour value for all of them, describing none of it. Those ranges reach a lot of miniature painters as the nearest colour on a match list, usually without the label being read.

Sold in a different container. Every row above with Spray in it is a page where one of the products is a can. A can is not a pot with a different lid: you cannot thin it, put it on a wet palette, shade with it, mix it into anything, or buy 12ml of it to try. It is an undercoat and a basecoat, applied at arm's length, and the fact that it holds the same colour as the pot beside it in the header is very nearly the least useful thing about it.

Mixed on a different chemistry. This is the one that costs money, and Mr. Hobby's pages are full of it. Black carries four labels: Acrysion, Aqueous Hobby Color, Mr Color and Mr Color Spray. Mr Color is a lacquer. Aqueous Hobby Color and Acrysion are water-based acrylics. They share a name, a catalogue colour and nothing else that matters — different thinner, different brush cleaning, different smell, different ventilation, and different rules about what may safely go over what is already on the model. A colour distance cannot see any of that, and neither can the swatch at the top of the page.

One code, several products

Look at the end of the header line. Mr. Hobby Gold names four ranges and prints one catalogue code, N9. Mr. Hobby's own numbering separates the lines it merges here: N for Acrysion, H for Aqueous Hobby Color, C for Mr Color. So the code on that page identifies exactly one of the four products, and a search or an order placed with it gets you that one bottle.

That is usually what you want — a specific thing to buy rather than a family — as long as you know it is what the code is doing. It is not the code for the page. It is the code for one of the pots the page is about.

Why the values match in the first place

Worth being straight about this, because it changes how much the table above proves. Two rows fold together here when the maker, the name and the recorded colour are all identical. That is evidence about how a catalogue was written down. It is not a measurement of two dried films.

The values on this site are community-sampled approximations. When a maker publishes one swatch for a colour name, whoever recorded it recorded it once, and it lands against every line that name appears in. So an identical value across four labels frequently means the maker treats these as one colour — a claim about intent — rather than these two pots measure the same. Pigment loads and binders differ; on a real model, a lacquer and an acrylic sharing a catalogue number will not always look like each other.

The weakest corner of it is white. The widest label set in this catalogue is a white: Vallejo White arrives under seven labels, one of them a surface primer and another a wash, all at #FFFFFF — and The Army Painter Matt White is #FFFFFF across four of its own. Pure white is the value a white gets recorded as when nobody put an instrument on it. Read a very wide label set on a white as a filing decision rather than a finding.

Where the value stops describing the pot at all

The same Mr. Hobby page pattern produces Clear and Flat Clear, both recorded at #FFFFFF across four ranges. They are varnishes — one gloss, one matt — and they are transparent. There is no field in a colour value for "you can see through this", so a coat that adds no colour at all is filed as the whitest colour there is, and the match list underneath ranks it against opaque white paints as though the comparison meant something.

Gold on that same set of labels is recorded as #DFB603, a flat yellow, because a flat-on reading is all a metallic ever gets. Neither case is a fault in the merge. Both are the ordinary limit of what six hex digits hold, showing up more sharply on the pages where one value has been asked to stand for four products.

What the match lists do not tell you

Every match row on this site prints a range label, and on these paints it prints the first one only. A row offering Balor Brown says Air. The pot is also sold as a Layer, and the row does not mention it.

That cuts both ways, and the second way is the expensive one. A row you passed over because it looked like an airbrush paint, or a spray, or a range you do not use, may well be on the shelf in the form you actually wanted. The paint's own page is the only place the whole set appears. On these 294 pages, clicking the row before you buy is not thoroughness — it is the only way to see what is for sale.

Buying the right one

1. Decide the job before you read the label. Brush, airbrush, rattlecan, undercoat. The label set on the page is a menu, and it cannot choose for you.
2. Read the whole set on the paint's page, not the single label on the match row that brought you there.
3. Treat the code as one product. If a shop lists that code, that is the pot arriving — not whichever of the labels you had in mind.
4. Where the labels cross a chemistry line, buy as though they were different paints that happen to share a colour, and think about what is already on the model before you put a lacquer over it.
5. None of this changes the substitution rules. Naming the job, setting the tolerance and testing on a scrap works the same way here as anywhere else — the order to decide in is unchanged.

The short version: a page on this site answers which colour. When the header carries a slash, the question of which pot is still open, and the number cannot close it.

Put it to work: find a paint from a hex code, open a conversion chart, or browse every range.