Color Study

M8 Color Checker

Built from 25+ years of studio practice.

Color Ready

Study the color structure of a painting through palette relationships, temperature, and simplified color groups.

Workspace

Reference Image

Upload an image to study the dominant color families.

How It Works

Upload an image to study the dominant color families, harmony, temperature, and focal color.

Uploaded reference for palette extraction

Click to upload your image

Color Harmony Scheme

Upload an image to see the detected harmony scheme.

No scheme yet

Upload an image to analyze the harmony structure.

Confidence --

What This Scheme Means

The detected harmony will be explained here after upload.

How This Painting Uses It

A painting-specific summary will appear here after analysis.

Painter Suggestions

Practical painter guidance will appear here after analysis.

Do / Don't

Do

Keep one hue family dominant.

Don't

Avoid splitting every hue equally.

How to study color in a painting

M8 Color Checker helps you examine dominant color families, temperature, harmony, and simplified color masses. Use it to turn a reference into a more deliberate palette plan.

  1. Upload a painting or reference and open Palette Analysis to inspect the main color families.
  2. Compare the dominant hue family with the focal accent. Use Color Mixer to sample a passage and study the suggested mixing approach.
  3. Open Block-In Map to simplify the image into 5, 10, or 20 large color masses before working on smaller details.

A studio example

In a warm still life with a small blue accent, inspect how much of the image belongs to each color family. If every object competes at the same saturation, test a quieter surrounding palette while keeping the accent distinct.

What to keep in mind

Screen color is not a paint formula. Camera white balance, lighting, pigments, and your display affect the result; test mixtures on your palette. Free-check and lifetime-access conditions are shown in the tool.

Continue your painting study

Created by Jan Matěják (Jan Matejak), oil painter, teacher, and creator of M8 Painting Tools.