Disc Dyeing Color Reference Chart

When working with white discs, it’s very easy to select good color dye combinations. However, white canvases are often harder to find in certain molds, and so we’re left to use off-white or colored discs.

This in turn, can limit our colors due to the way that dyes blend on these colored discs. I’m gonna show you all a tool I made to help make this selection process a little bit easier. This is my dye selection chart that I made Procreate.

This chart features two main elements. On the right is a grid of all the color swatches from pro chemical and dye’s website, and on the left is a window showing the background color or what we’ll be using to show the disk color. All the swatches are layered on top of the disk color layer and set to darken, meaning that whatever color is below will be darkened by any color on the swatch layer.

At the moment, all the colors look correct how they normally appear because the background layer is set to white. However, when I click that layer and add some color, you can see that all the swatches have changed. This change mimics how dye might react on a disc of this color.

Now, this is not exact as these swatches from Pro Chemical & Dye are based on how they look on fabric, not plastic, and each plastic type takes dye in a little different, albeit similar way. As I rotate around the color wheel. You can see the effect of how certain dyes become either drowned out and darkened almost completely, or appear to show no effect at all.

This is easier to see once the color is more fully saturated. Here on the color red, almost all of our dyes are showing up as either red or black, letting us know that unfortunately, not much color value is possible on this red disc.

As I said, there are also a number of other factors that make this chart simply a helpful guide and not the end all be all of color appearances. These include dye mixture ratios, medium choices, developing times, plastic types and dye types.

This chart is available in a few different file formats that you can download below. We have the procreate version and a version for Photoshop and Illustrator. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little demo on my color selection chart and I hope you’ve found this helpful!

—-

Download Files Here:

Procreate File

Adobe Photoshop File

Adobe Illustrator File