Polymer Color Recipes in an App? Why, Yes!

So I spent my day at Sandy Camp in San Diego with a wonderfully enthusiastic group. I taught a mokume gane workshop with my little clayers coming up with some gorgeous results. However, I was too busy chatting and answering questions to direct my in-room photographer (thanks Mrs. Friesen!) to get some close up shots of the really wonderful color combinations and patterns that filled the tables. But what I did get, as did the rest of the lucky attendees, was a first look at a great new app created by our community’s own Nancy Ulrich. It may not seem like digital apps would have a place in hands-on craft, but this one was created just for clayers like you and me. Especially if you like color.

Well, that’s a silly thing to say. Who here doesn’t like color? But who here dreads trying to work up a color palette then figure out the color recipe for each color? If you raised a virtual hand in response to both those questions, then the ColorMixr app is going to be your new best friend! This is a purely polymer-clay-centric, color-picking, and palette-creating app. It was just released last night–it had just gone live in the Google Store hours before the demo I saw and the first Apple downloads happened by people in the room as Nancy presented it.

Here’s how it works: You take a photo, upload an image, or pick something you find online and feed it into the app . The app has little circles that will automatically pick out 5 colors to create a palette but you can also move over the image until each circle is over a color you want (see the screen shot upper left). You can also choose colors in a color wheel to adjust the color choices (screen shot upper right). Once you have your palette saved inot your palette library (screen shot lower left), tap on the palette to get a list of the color recipes for each color in it (screen shot lower right) … based off your specified brand of polymer! That’s pretty darn nifty! And know that Nancy has personally mixed and checked all 2000+ colors recipes available in this app–she even brought all the boxes of samples she made to prove it. Phew! She has been one busy lady!

We’ll be working on a review and a how-to-use-it article for the next issue, but in the meantime, download it for yourself and go play! It’s free to use for the next 30 days. If you like it, you can have this handy tool literally at your fingertips to capture any color sets you see out and about or online for a monthly membership ($3.99 with big discounts for pre-paid 6 & 12 month memberships) with regular color updates and/or new colors every week. Just search for “ColorMixr” (no ‘e’ in mixer) in the Google App store or Apple store.

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