Miniature Paint Conversion Chart (Download Link)

Last updated June 21, 2026. By Andrew M. Tan.

Your favorite Citadel green discontinued. A half-empty bottle of Reaper MSP sits next to a project that needs ten more drops, and the bottle is dry.

Paint lines shift year to year. Citadel reformulates colors. New brands launch with no cross-reference to anything that came before. A static chart, however well built, ages the moment a manufacturer changes a formula.

RELATED: BEST MINIATURE PAINT SET COLLECTIONS (TOP 10 REVIEWED)

Try the Paint Color Matcher First

The fastest route to a match across roughly 150 colors spanning Citadel, Army Painter Warpaints, Scale75, Vallejo Game Color, and AK Interactive is the paint color matcher. Pick a color from one brand and see the closest equivalents in the others, updated as new lines get added. The download chart below still has a place, but the matcher works as the better starting point for most situations.

What to Do When No Listed Match Is Close Enough

Sometimes the closest listed match isn’t close enough. The undertone reads warmer, the value sits a shade darker, and the swatch on screen never quite matches the bottle in hand.

Hue, value, and saturation drive every color decision. Hue is the color family itself, red against orange against violet. Value tracks how light or dark a color sits. Saturation measures purity, the difference between a vivid red and a dusty brick red holding the same hue at a lower intensity.

A wet palette earns its keep here. Mix toward the target on the palette itself, working in small increments, checking the result against the model under the same light you’ll paint under. Parchment paper on a wet palette keeps the mix workable long enough to dial it in instead of guessing once and committing. The same instinct trained painters bring to color before they pick up a brush applies here, and what classical art teaches miniature painters about color covers that thinking in more depth.

Why a Close Match Can Still Look Wrong

Brand-to-brand matching solves hue and value. It says nothing about finish.

Citadel Contrast paints and Vallejo Game Color can share an identical RGB value and still read as different colors, because the medium itself changes how light bounces off the surface. A matte finish and a satin finish catch light in different ways under the same lamp. Metallics carry mica or aluminum particles that no flat color chart can represent.

Batch variation adds another layer. Two bottles of the same paint, bought a year apart, can differ enough to notice under raking light. None of this makes brand matching pointless. A matched color works as a starting point, confirmed against the actual model before it goes anywhere near the rest of the miniature.

The Spreadsheet Chart Still Has a Use

The downloadable chart below predates several of these brands and won’t catch reformulated colors, but it still works as an offline reference, something to keep open at the workbench without an internet connection.

How the Matcher and the Chart Cover Different Ground

The matcher and the chart don’t cover identical ground. The chart includes Reaper and Formula P3 lines absent from the matcher. The matcher includes Scale75 and AK Interactive, both newer to the hobby than the chart itself. If a specific paint went discontinued entirely, the guide to texture paint alternatives covers substitutes for one of the more commonly discontinued lines. Checking both tools, when a brand falls outside one’s range, beats assuming a single source has every line covered.

A perfect cross-brand match doesn’t exist. Hue and value can convert close enough to work. Finish, batch, and the light over your desk still belong to you to judge, one mixed test swatch at a time.

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By Andrew M. Tan, PhD
Andrew is a commissioned miniature painter with more than 15 years of experience painting tabletop miniatures, photographing models, and testing hobby tools in real-world use. Read his full bio.