The paint cross-reference converter on ToolFiddle matches a color from one paint range to the closest equivalent in another, so you can follow a painting recipe or reproduce a scheme using the paints you already own. You start with a color you know, a Citadel shade from a tutorial, a Vallejo tone from your shelf, an Army Painter or Reaper color from a friend's guide, and the tool points you to the nearest match in the range you want. It is built for miniature and model painters who constantly mix brands, and it exists because the perfect color you need is often sold under a different name by a different company.
Anyone who paints tabletop miniatures or scale models runs into this fast. A Warhammer painting guide lists Citadel colors, but your local shop stocks Vallejo. A tutorial calls for a paint that was discontinued three range refreshes ago. A friend's stunning red is an Army Painter color and you paint with Reaper. Cross-referencing bridges those gaps. The important thing to understand from the start is that these are close matches, not identical clones, and this guide explains how to use them well.
What this tool does and who it is for
The tool solves a specific, common problem: you have a color in one brand's language and you need it in another's. Instead of squinting at a printed chart or asking a forum and waiting for replies, you pick your source color and target range and get the nearest equivalent right away, with a few close alternatives ranked by how well they match. That turns a frustrating detour into a quick lookup.
The main audience is miniature painters working with Citadel, Vallejo, Army Painter, Reaper, and P3, and scale modelers who lean on Tamiya, Vallejo, and similar ranges. Beginners use it to follow tutorials without buying a second full paint set. Experienced painters use it to substitute when a color is out of stock, to switch to a range they prefer for layering or airbrushing, and to hunt down replacements for the discontinued pots that every long-time hobbyist has mourned. Collectors matching an existing army's scheme use it to stay consistent when their original paints vanish from shelves.
It helps to be clear about what the tool is not. It is not a promise that two paints are identical, and it is not a replacement for a quick test swatch. It is a fast, sensible way to find the best available substitute, which you then confirm with your own eyes on your own model.
Why cross-referenced matches are close, not exact
This is the single most important thing to understand, so it comes first. The paint ranges were never designed to map onto each other. Games Workshop, Vallejo, Army Painter, Reaper, Privateer Press, and Tamiya each built their palettes independently, with their own pigments, their own naming, and their own idea of what a given color should be. There is no shared master list, so a true one-to-one equivalent between two brands usually does not exist.
What a good paint cross-reference converter does instead is find the nearest color. It compares your source color against every option in the target range and returns the one with the smallest difference, plus other close contenders. That match might be a shade lighter, a hair darker, a touch warmer, or slightly cooler than the original. For many colors the difference is small enough to ignore, especially once the paint is on a model among other colors. For tricky tones, deep navies, specific ochres, and the many unique shades a brand cooks up, the gap can be more noticeable.
That is why the tool puts a closeness rating right next to every result rather than hiding it. A match labeled very close is about as near as two ranges get. A match labeled loose is simply the nearest thing that range sells, and the tool says so plainly instead of pretending otherwise. None of this makes cross-referencing useless. Far from it. It means you should treat every result as a strong, informed candidate rather than a guaranteed twin, and confirm it with a test. Painters who understand this get excellent results across brands. The ones who expect a perfect clone and skip the swatch are the ones who end up disappointed.
The paint ranges this tool covers
The focus is the hobby and miniature world, where brand mixing is the norm.
Citadel, made by Games Workshop, is the default language of Warhammer tutorials and is organized into base, layer, shade, contrast, technical, and metallic types. Its colors are widely referenced, which is exactly why so many people need to convert away from it to paints they can get more easily or cheaply.
Vallejo offers several lines, and the distinction matters. Model Color is a fine-pigment range popular with scale modelers, Game Color is aimed at fantasy miniatures with a slightly different consistency, and Model Air is thinned for airbrushing. This tool treats Model Color and Game Color as separate target ranges for exactly that reason, because a conversion should tell you which Vallejo line it points to. They are not interchangeable in handling even where the colors line up.
Army Painter Warpaints are a hobby favorite known for value and for pairing with the brand's colored primers. Reaper Master Series is a large, well-loved range among fantasy and role-playing miniature painters, sold in dropper bottles. Privateer Press P3 grew up alongside the Warmachine game and has a devoted following. Tamiya sits a little apart because its acrylics are solvent-based rather than water-based, which changes how they thin, spray, and cure, and makes finish and handling as important as color when you convert to or from them. The tool shows a short handling note for whichever range you are converting into, so that difference never catches you out.
How the ToolFiddle paint cross-reference converter works
Under the hood the tool holds a table of equivalents that painters commonly cite, brand by brand, grouped by color concept. Alongside that, it treats each paint as a color value and measures the distance between your chosen color and every candidate in the target range. The smallest distance is the closest match, a method often called nearest-neighbor or color-distance matching. If the range you picked has a charted equivalent for your paint, that pairing is shown first and labeled as a listed equivalent. If it does not, the tool falls back to pure color distance and labels the result as nearest by color, so you always know which kind of answer you are looking at.
It is worth saying plainly what that table is. It holds a curated set of the colors painters cross-reference most, not a scan of every pot each brand has ever sold, so a very unusual shade may only find a loose neighbor in a given range. When that happens the tool labels the result loose rather than dressing it up, which is more useful than a confident-looking answer that is wrong. It also drops runners-up that are too far off to be real options instead of padding the list to a fixed length.
The distance itself is measured in a perceptual color space rather than raw red, green, and blue numbers, because two colors can be far apart numerically and look almost identical, or the reverse. That figure is shown as a delta value beside each result and turned into a plain-language rating: very close, close, fair, or loose. It is more consistent than eyeballing a printed chart, because it compares numbers rather than relying on how a swatch happens to print or display. The tool also surfaces the next-closest options, which is useful when the top match is not quite the temperature you want and a runner-up suits better.
Everything runs in your browser the moment you choose a color and a target range, so you can explore freely. Compare how a Citadel shade maps into both Vallejo Game Color and Army Painter, or check whether your Reaper collection already holds something close to a color a tutorial demands. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is saved to a server, and there is no limit on lookups, so planning a whole army's palette across brands costs nothing and stays private.
The tool is honest about working from swatch data. On-screen colors and manufacturer swatches are simplified stand-ins for real paint, which changes as it dries and shifts over different primers. So the converter gets you to a strong candidate quickly and expects you to confirm it with a test swatch under your own lighting. That combination, fast digital shortlist plus a real-world check, is how you get reliable results across ranges.
How to use the tool step by step
The whole process takes a minute or two and saves you from buying paints you do not need or chasing colors that no longer exist.
- Choose your source range. Pick the brand you are starting from in the "from range" list, for example Citadel when you are following a Warhammer tutorial.
- Find your color. Type part of the name or the code into the search box, then tap the paint in the list below it. Vallejo codes like 70.950 and alternate names like Negro are searchable too.
- Choose your target range. Select the brand you want to convert into, the paints you actually own or can buy locally, such as Vallejo, Army Painter, Reaper, or Tamiya.
- Read the closest match. The source swatch and the match sit side by side, with the closeness rating, the distance figure, and whether it is a listed equivalent or just the nearest color in that range.
- Check the alternatives. Up to three runners-up are listed underneath in order of closeness, which is where you go if the top match reads a shade too warm or too cool for the scheme. If nothing else in that range is genuinely close, the tool says so rather than padding the list.
- Note the paint type. Each result shows whether the match is a base, layer, or metallic in Citadel terms, or which Vallejo line it belongs to, since consistency and use differ.
- Test before you commit. Brush a swatch of the matched paint on scrap or a hidden part of the model, over the same primer you will use, let it dry, and compare it to the original color or your intended scheme.
- Adjust if needed. If the match reads slightly off, try a listed alternative, or plan to tweak it with a thin glaze, a lighter highlight, or a wash to bring it in line.
There is no submit button to hunt for, no account, and no cap on lookups. The swap button flips the conversion around, turning the match you just found into your new starting paint, which is handy when you want to check that a pairing holds up in both directions. The copy button drops the whole shortlist into your notes or a shopping list.
Worked examples
Example one: following a Citadel tutorial with Vallejo paints
You found a great Space Marine tutorial that lists Citadel colors, but your paint rack is all Vallejo. You start with Citadel Abaddon Black and the converter points to Vallejo Black, which in Model Color is labeled Negro. Blacks match easily, so that one is safe, and the tool rates it very close. Next the guide calls for Macragge Blue, a deep Ultramarines navy, and the converter offers Vallejo's Ultramarine Blue, listed as Azul Ultramar, as the closest option. Navies are trickier, so you brush a test swatch over the same primer and compare. It is very close, and a thin highlight brings it exactly where you want it. You have followed the tutorial without buying a single new pot.
Example two: replacing a discontinued color
An older painting guide you love calls for a Citadel color that was retired two range refreshes ago and no longer exists on any shelf. You enter the nearest current color you can identify, and the paint cross-reference converter finds equivalents in Vallejo and Army Painter as well as elsewhere in Citadel's own lineup. You pick the Army Painter match because you already own it, test it against a photo of the finished piece from the guide, and it lands close enough that the rest of the recipe still works. A discontinued paint that would have stalled the whole project becomes a quick substitution.
Example three: matching an existing army when your paint runs out
You are halfway through painting a large army in a signature red, and your pot of that color is nearly empty and now hard to find. You cross-reference it into a range your local store stocks, get the closest match, and test it on a spare model next to a finished one. It reads a touch warmer, so you check the runner-up option, which sits closer, and choose that. The army stays consistent even though your original paint is gone, which is exactly the kind of rescue cross-referencing is built for.
Real-world use cases
Following tutorials is the big one. Most published miniature guides speak Citadel, and painters who use other brands rely on cross-referencing to translate every step into paints they own.
Saving money drives a lot of conversions too. Some ranges cost more per milliliter than others, and painters cross-reference to buy the same colors in a cheaper or larger-bottle range without losing the scheme they want.
Switching for handling is common among experienced painters. Someone might prefer Vallejo's thinner consistency for layering, or Tamiya for airbrushing, and convert a scheme they like into the range that behaves the way they paint.
Chasing discontinued colors is a recurring need. Brands refresh their lines, rename pots, and retire colors, so any painter who has been at the hobby for a few years eventually needs a modern stand-in for a color from an old recipe.
Scale modelers cross-reference to hit specific real-world colors for aircraft, armor, and cars, and to substitute when a shop is out of the exact pot a build calls for. Matching consistency across a long project matters as much to them as it does to army painters.
Commission painters and hobby clubs lean on cross-referencing for a different reason: consistency across people and time. A painter taking on a client's half-finished army needs to match a scheme built from paints they may not own, sometimes paints that are no longer sold. A gaming group sharing a single recipe wants every member to reach the same result whether they paint with Citadel, Vallejo, or Army Painter. In both cases the converter turns one person's paint list into something everyone can reproduce, which keeps a shared army or a display board looking like it came from one hand rather than several. Teachers running painting workshops use it the same way, translating a demo done in one range into whatever paints the students brought to the table.
A closer look at finish and handling
Color is only half the story, and skipping the other half is a classic mistake. Two paints can match closely in hue and still look different on the model because their finish differs. Some ranges dry dead matte, others satin, others with a slight sheen, and finish changes how a color reads under light. A matte and a satin version of the same color can look like two different shades once the light hits them, especially on curved miniature surfaces.
Handling matters just as much. Vallejo tends to come thinner out of the bottle, which many painters love for smooth layering but which means you may need fewer thinning drops than with a thicker Citadel paint. Army Painter Warpaints have their own consistency and pair naturally with the brand's colored primers. Tamiya acrylics are solvent-based rather than water-based, so they thin with their own thinner or with alcohol, spray beautifully through an airbrush, and can even lightly bite into bare plastic, all of which sets them apart from the water-based ranges. When you cross-reference to or from Tamiya, remember you are matching color while accepting a different way of working. That is why the tool shows a handling note for the range you are converting into: it tells you the closest color, and you decide whether that paint's finish and behavior fit the job.
A closer look at metallics, washes, and technical paints
Solid, opaque colors cross-reference well. The harder cases deserve their own warning. Metallic paints depend on the size and type of metallic flake and on how reflective the finish is, and those qualities vary widely between brands. Two silver paints can look quite different on a blade even when their base color value is close, so treat metallic conversions as a rough pointer and test them on the actual surface.
Washes and shades are about behavior as much as color. A wash needs to flow into recesses and pool where you want shadow, and its pigment load and surface tension decide how it settles. A same-color wash from another brand may pool differently, dry with a different sheen, or tint the surface more or less strongly. Citadel's Contrast paints and various technical paints add another layer of difficulty, because they are formulated to do things standard acrylics do not, flowing and shading in one coat or creating texture and effects. There is often no true equivalent in another range, only an approximation of the base color that will not reproduce the effect. For all of these, use the paint cross-reference converter to get near the color, then rely on testing and technique to get the result, and accept that some signature paints simply do not convert cleanly.
A note on house paint and automotive cross-referencing
Most people searching for a converter mean hobby and model paints, but cross-referencing runs through the entire paint world, and it is worth a brief tour. Home decorators often want to match a color between brands, taking a Sherwin-Williams shade to its nearest Behr or Benjamin Moore equivalent, or vice versa, when a favorite color is sold by a store they cannot reach. Paint retailers can often color-match a physical sample directly, and third-party charts list popular cross-brand pairings.
Automotive refinishing is its own world of paint codes. Every vehicle has a specific factory color code, and refinishers cross-reference those codes across paint systems such as PPG and others to mix a match for a repair or respray. The same close-not-exact rule applies, and the stakes are high, so professionals rely on physical color chips and spray-out cards rather than screen swatches, and account for how metallic and pearl finishes shift with angle and light. For both walls and cars, the guidance mirrors the miniature world: use a cross-reference to narrow the choice, then confirm with a real sample in the actual lighting, because sheen and light change everything.
Tips and common mistakes
A few habits separate painters who get great cross-brand results from those who end up frustrated.
- Never skip the test swatch. On-screen colors are approximations, and paint shifts as it dries and over different primers, so the two minutes it takes to brush a swatch on scrap saves a repaint.
- Read the paint type, not just the name. A Citadel base, a Citadel layer, and a Citadel shade are used very differently, and so are Vallejo Model Color, Game Color, and Model Air. A right color in the wrong consistency will fight you.
- Prime the same way before you judge. Comparing a match painted over white primer against an original painted over black will make two good matches look nothing alike. Thin your paint the same way too.
- Try the runner-up before buying a new range. Usually a listed alternative, or a small tweak with a wash, a glaze, or a lighter highlight, closes the gap without a shopping spree.
- Judge under the right light. A match that looks perfect under warm workshop light can drift under cool daylight or a display case LED, so check it where the finished piece will sit.
- Calibrate your expectations for the hard colors. Blacks, whites, and clean primaries convert reliably. Deep navies, specific ochres, metallics, washes, and Contrast paints are where matches loosen.
Your data stays on your device
Everything you enter into the paint cross-reference converter, the source color, the target range, any list of paints you are planning, stays in your browser. The whole cross-reference table ships with the page and the matching runs in JavaScript on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded to a server, nothing is stored on our end, and there is no account quietly logging your palette. Close the tab and the session is gone. You can plan an entire army's color scheme across three brands and know that none of those choices ever left your screen. Privacy here is not a toggle to find; it is simply how the tool works.
Free with no strings attached
The tool is genuinely free. There is no sign-up, no account to create, no email to hand over, and no premium tier hiding the good matches behind a paywall. Every range, every color, and every conversion is open to anyone who loads the page. You will not look up three colors and then hit a wall asking for payment to see the fourth. Free means the whole tool, for as long as you want to use it, with nothing held back.
Instant, unlimited, and works offline
Because the matching happens on your own device, results appear the instant you pick a color and a target range, with no spinner and no server round-trip. There is no daily cap on lookups, so convert one color or a hundred while planning a project. The page is deliberately lightweight, so it loads fast and stays responsive even on an older phone at the hobby store.
The tool runs on whatever you have to hand, a phone in the shop while you decide which paint to buy, a tablet at the workbench, or a laptop while you plan a scheme. Since the matching logic and the whole table live in your browser rather than on a remote server, it keeps working even without a connection. Once the page has loaded, you can lose signal and still look up conversions, compare ranges, and read the notes. That is useful exactly when you need it, standing in a store deciding whether the pot in your hand is close enough to the color your project calls for.
Related ToolFiddle tools
A few other free ToolFiddle tools pair naturally with painting projects. Use the color picker to explore exact color values and pick a target shade. Pull a palette straight out of reference art or a photo of a finished model with the palette extractor, or grab a single color from an image using the color picker from image. If you are converting bottle sizes or thinning ratios between units, the unit converter handles the math in seconds. Each one runs on your device with the same privacy-first design.
Quick recap
The paint cross-reference converter matches a color in one range to the closest equivalent in another, focused on the hobby and model brands painters actually mix: Citadel, Vallejo Model Color and Game Color, Army Painter, Reaper, P3, and Tamiya. Matches are close, not exact, because the ranges were built independently, so the tool combines a table of commonly cited equivalents with nearest-color matching, labels which kind of answer you got, and rates how close it really is. Finishes and handling differ, metallics and washes and technical paints are the hardest to match, and discontinued colors are a common reason to convert. House-paint and automotive cross-referencing follow the same close-not-exact rule. The tool is free, private, instant, and works on any device even offline, and every result is a candidate you confirm with a test swatch.