Anybody out there mixing marine paint to custom colors?
I’m mixing Interlux Toplac Plus colors to my preference, for an Annapolis wherry. First time builder/painter - what could go wrong?
Wherry wisdom says it looks best in a light color. But I’ve done enough painting walls white, and wanted some color. Ordered 1qt Seafoam Green YLK256, and tried it on a wood tray that needed repainting: nice, but more intense than I wanted on the boat.
Ordered 1 qt Off White, YLK192 (which I could live with if it all went sideways), and made small-pot trial mixes by serially diluting the “green” paint into the off-white with two syringes: 10ml 256 + 10ml 192; added 10ml of that mix (using the “white” syringe) to 10 ml 192; then 10ml of that mix to 10 ml 192, to give green/white ratios of 1:1, 1:3 and 1:7. Put these on a roughly prepped scrap board - unmixed paints at each end):
Chose 1:3 (middle stripe) and mixed a large batch by weight (in 2qt container on a kitchen balance), using most of the remaining off-white plus 1/3 that weight of green, and filled a stop-loss bag. This gave me enough for 3 coats on the wherry with a little left over for touch-ups after I run it into rocks, docks, and mooring buoys - and most of the green can to remix if needed. No apparent problems with mixing, rolling or brushing.
Here it is on the (unvarnished) boat, in mostly daylight - open garage door. Please view from >6 ft away!
Welcome Maurice! Thank you for responding, your boat turned out really nice. I’m trying to get a light sage green. I ordered (from CLC) white prekote primer, blue/gray prekote primer, jet black toplac, platinum toplac, donegal green toplac, and snow white toplac. I want my outer hull to be primarily black, the top strake sage green. Most of the internals sage green with the deck, spars, and rails varnished. Internal lockers will be white. I’m not big on glossy coatings so I’ll likely use a scotch brite pad to knock some of the luster down.
Not doing it these days, but some years back I mixed up a custom light blue (Carolina Blue, Swimming Pool Blue, whatever) for the interior of an open boat using System Three paint. It worked very well and I documented the proportions so that I could mix new batches for touchup. Then System Three discontinued the paint 
. But custom mixing worked well and is very feasible.
Laszlo
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Thanks Laszlo! You guys are giving me confidence I sorely lack. If I get this wrong it will waste a lot of expensive paint. My plan is to make several tiny test batches and put a few coats of each one down in an area nobody will see like the flotation chambers. I know from painting this color on other things that it looks gray for about two coats and doesn’t start getting that nice sage green color till coat three or four.
The test batches are definitely a good idea, but why put them on the boat? If you test on epoxied scrap wood you’ll get the info without risking the boat. The test places may be inconspicuous but Murphy is waiting to bump your elbow as you lean over to access them.
Laszlo
So I thought I would let CoPilot AI take a stab at figuring this out. It made a wonky rendering for what I want to do, more or less and it figured out roughly the proportions I’ll need to mix the paint. Will they work? Who knows…
