Picolor Gives You the Ability to Mix Any Paint Color at Home

When you go to a hardware store to purchase paint—to repaint your home’s walls, for instance—they don’t keep all of the thousands of available in inventory. Instead, they mix the paint on demand by adding pigment to a white paint. And yet, if you do arts and crafts at home, you’re probably stuck purchasing small bottles of pre-mixed paint in a bunch of different colors.

That’s just inefficient and wasteful, and Picolor is here to solve that problem. Picolor is a small device — about the size of a chinchilla — that sits on your desk and instantly mixes paint at the touch of a button. It uses a CMYK (plus white) color model, which allows Picolor to mix cyan, magenta, yellow, key (black), and white pigments to create more than a million unique paint colors.

When you’re ready to create a new paint color, you simply connect your smartphone to Picolor via BlueTooth and launch the companion app (Apple or Android). The app then lets you choose your color visually, by name like “Cornflower Blue,” or by it’s hexadecimal code. You can save the colors you’ve created in case you want to make more later, and then you just push the button and it starts mixing.

You can then either use the paint with a brush like any other paint, or put it into the supplied tubes to use it as a marker. Picolor is currently on Kickstarter, and the campaign lasts until April 11th. Early bird specials are still available for $129, and should ship by the end of 2018.