I explore the mathematical transformation that occurs in color coordinate space when physically mixing paints of two different colors. I tested 120 pairs of 16 paint colors and used a linear regression to find the most accurate combination of input parameters, both in RGB space and several other color spaces. I found that the fit with the strongest coefficient of determination was a geometrically symmetrized linear combination of the colors in CIEXYZ space, while this same mapping in RGB space returns a better mean squared error.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2406.15364,
title = {Mixing Paint: An analysis of color value transformations in multiple coordinate spaces using multivariate linear regression},
author = {Alexander Messick},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.15364},
year = {2024}
}