The professional colour reference for oil painters
Pigment Scout is a research and planning tool built specifically for oil painters who want to understand the pigments behind the paint — not just the names on the tubes.
What is Pigment Scout?
Pigment Scout is a comprehensive oil paint database and colour planning platform. It indexes thousands of paints from the world's finest manufacturers, cross-referenced against the international Colour Index (CI) pigment system.
Every paint in our database is catalogued with its pigment composition, colour family, temperature, opacity, lightfastness rating, and brand tier — so you can make informed decisions about what goes on your palette.
Whether you're a student building your first limited palette or a professional refining a signature set, Pigment Scout gives you the information you need in one place.
Why it matters
Pigment data is scattered across individual brand websites — we bring it all together.
Not all paints labelled the same colour are made the same way. Pigment codes tell the real story.
Lightfastness, opacity, and temperature matter when building a serious palette — we surface all of it.
Colour harmony decisions should be grounded in the actual pigments you own, not abstract theory.
What Pigment Scout offers
Four core tools, designed around how painters actually work.
Pigment Index
FreeBrowse the complete CI (Colour Index) Pigment Index — the international standard used by every professional paint manufacturer. Cross-reference pigment codes with the oil paints that use them, filtered by brand, colour family, and chemical type.
Painters Colour Finder
MembersA powerful search and filter tool across thousands of paint colours. Find exactly the right paint by pigment code, colour family, temperature, opacity, lightfastness, and brand — all at once.
Build Custom Palettes
MembersCurate and save your personal paint selections. Build palettes for specific subjects, lighting conditions, or colour harmonies, and revisit them any time.
Colour Harmony Tools
MembersExplore complementary and analogous colour relationships on an interactive colour wheel. Understand how colours sit relative to one another to make more informed mixing decisions.
Brands covered
We index 15 brands across three quality tiers — from hand-ground professional colours to accessible student-grade ranges.
Meet the founder
The person behind Pigment Scout.
Javier Garcia
Oil Painter & Founder
I'm an oil painter with a deep passion for colour and colour theory. Pigment Scout grew out of my own frustration with scattered paint data and the lack of a reliable reference for serious painters. I built this tool to make pigment research simpler, faster, and more useful for everyone who loves working with oil paint.