What is Reddit's opinion of 1,500 Color Mixing Recipes for Oil, Acrylic & Watercolor: Achieve precise color when painting landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and more?

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Not really. In order to have an accurate calculator you would need accurate color values for every paint. Unfortunately paint varies from batch to batch just a little and frankly unless you are measuring at the 0.1ml level or precision you will get additional variations.

What you can do though is obtain a book of color recipes and then use primary colors from each paint line to mix a color you like. Useful if you want to mix a unique color.

For most typical modeling applications modelers have developed recipes for colors. For example: Soviet Aircraft were painted a light blue underneath called AMT-7 — one way to mix this using Tamiya paint is you mix 6 parts XF-23, 2 parts XF-8, 2 parts XF-2. There are other recipes for each color.

These kind of artist paints are all that I use to paint. Thinning them down is handy, but not essential. If you are careful to not overload the paint and rely on very thin layers they work fine right out of the tube with a bit of medium mixed in. Artist acrylics tend to have a very high pigment density and very finely ground pigment they also are very opaque compared to pre-mixed miniatures paints so it takes less paint to achieve a similar effect.

The biggest difference is that you'll be mixing colors more often. Artist paints are very forgiving in that regard, but you will probably want some kind of mixing guide until you are used to the properties of the paint.

This is the answer. I bought this book (https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1600582834/ ) when I first started out and it was helpful for a minute. But actually doing the mixing is how I learned too.

Mark Carder of Draw Mix Paint's video for mixing oil paints was really helpful for me in mixing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNB3XY67Q-I

If you use an iPhone, the iModelKit app can help with mixing. I find it so-so, as it relies on scanning web colors, not measuring them directly. However once you know a color’s correct values, you can mix in the app to get close, which gives some ideas. I then try the mix IRL and adjust to my liking.

Get a color wheel. It helps with visualizing where to begin and which colors to start with. As you get more comfortable, consider getting a color recipe book that has every color you would want and ratios of colors needed to mix them.

If your available colors will be limited, but you are willing to buy modeling paints via mail order, I recommend Tamiya. It sprays very well using either DIY store lacquer or isopropyl alcohol 91%. The latter is better but it is possible to mix a tiny bit of lacquer thinner into the IPA. There are quite a few mixes using Tamiya for just about any and all military colors.

I’d focus on the base colors: white, black, red, blue, green, yellow, and silver. You can use the colors to mix or adjust the other colors to just about any color you would want. If you know you’ll use a premixed color often, get it.