01 / IDENTIFY
Pick any color
Click a point in your reference and immediately see its Munsell hue, value and chroma, in context, not in isolation.
A color tool for painters
See color.
Paint color.
ChromaMagic helps artists see the colors that are actually there then understand them as hue, value and chroma. Built by watercolor artist and teacher Michele Clamp.
iPhone · iPad · Mac · Windows · Android · One-time purchase
Train your eyes. One color at a time.
Built by a working painter to solve a painter's oldest problem.
ONE-TIME PURCHASE PER PLATFORM · NO SUBSCRIPTION · NO DATA COLLECTED
Inspired by science, created by an artist
Michele spent a career reading the human genome. Now she helps artists how to read color.
Michele Clamp is a full-time watercolor painter, educator and artist working in New England. Before the easel, she was a physicist and genomics researcher at Oxford, Cambridge, MIT and Harvard. One stubborn question but what is that color? followed her from the lab back to the studio, and became ChromaMagic, the Munsell color tool she now shares with painters everywhere.
ChromaMagic
Stop guessing.
Start seeing.
Artists don't experience a reference as RGB values or hex codes. We see relationships: warm and cool, light and dark, intense and quiet. ChromaMagic turns those relationships into something you can work with at the easel.
02 / UNDERSTAND
See the big picture
Reduce a photograph into value areas, explore chroma, use the color wheel and simplify distracting detail before you paint.
03 / PAINT
Make better mixtures
Build a useful palette from your reference and get practical mixing suggestions from an expanded database of artist paints.
04 / LIVE ACTION
Perfect for plein air
Live camera mode with instant Munsell chip detection, use outside to get the real picture
05 / NO SUBSCRIPTIONS
One tube of paint
A single purchase per platform. No subscription, no account, no data collected for the price of one tube of paint.
06 / ALL OF THE PAINTS
Over 700 tubes!
An expanded paint database, including M. Graham oils and Michael Harding oils, maps digital color back to the pigments right on your palette.
Feedback
Painters talk
"ChromaMagic is pure genius, it's gotten me out of pits I've dug for myself so many times."
"It has made an incredible difference in my painting and my ability to judge color."
"One of the most intuitively designed apps I have ever seen."
"I use it for every single painting I do now. Worth every penny."
"A total game changer for understanding the true nature of color and hue."
"I went from skeptic to purchase faster than any app I've ever used."
Michele's personal Story
"I wanted to train my brain to see color as it is, not as I expected it to be."
Michele grew up in England, where she sat beside her father as he sketched the Suffolk countryside, her own small notebook open beside his.
She wasn't especially good at it yet, but the joy of art had been planted early. Years later, an art teacher at high school set her class in front of an old mechanical typewriter and told them to draw it. It was a strange, difficult subject, and the longer Michele looked at it, the more its tangle of levers and keys began to make sense on the page. She had discovered what it meant to truly see something.
Art stayed with her through school, running alongside an equal love of science and maths. When it came time for university, science won out.
For two decades Michele worked at the leading edge of genomics, including the Human Genome Project, work she describes as every bit as creative, and every bit as consuming, as painting. Art went on the back burner. She always knew she'd return to it; she just didn't know when.
"When I first started taking art classes again, I really didn't know what I was doing, and in retrospect, it was the best thing."After stepping away from big science in 2017, Michele let go of her algorithms, software and data, and finally picked up her brushes and paper full time.
Today she paints out of her studio in central Massachusetts, drawing on the ruggedness of the the US landscape, from the Maine coast to the farms of Vermont.
Returning to her science background, Michele eventually began building ChromaMagic to support her own painting journey. She wanted a better way to understand what she was seeing, especially those colors that look obvious until you try to mix them.
What started as a personal learning tool became an app for painters who want to get better at seeing color.
Michele wants you to see color, and paint color - together.
Michele Clamp · scientist · artist · educator
A serious painting companion, for all of us who are always learning
Palette mode, mixing suggestions, live camera chip detection, reduce and simplify your subject, a 700+ color paint database, value and chroma views, grid overlays and more. We want you to paint better.
No subscription · No data collected · Use at the easel
For painters who want to see better
The better you can see color, the better you can paint it.
Use ChromaMagic as a reference tool, a color exercise, or a companion at the easel. Start with a photograph. Try the live camera outside. Click a color.
See what you missed.
ONE-TIME PURCHASE PER PLATFORM · NO SUBSCRIPTION · NO DATA COLLECTED