On a screen they make gray. Dollop is a puzzle about mixing paint, and the paint in it behaves the way paint behaves. You are given a color. You mix it.
Tap a pigment to put a dollop on the board. This is the game itself, running the app's own arithmetic rather than a picture of it.
Free. iPhone, iOS 17 and later. One optional purchase, no subscription.
A screen adds light. Red, green and blue emitters sum, so blue light plus yellow light gives you something pale and washed out. Paint does the opposite. Every pigment removes part of the spectrum, and what reaches your eye is only the light that nothing absorbed. Blue pigment takes out the red end, yellow pigment takes out the blue end, and the middle survives. The middle is green.
So the ratio matters and the order does not. Two parts blue to one part yellow lands somewhere different from one to one, exactly as it would on a palette, and getting there is the game: a little more yellow, a little more white, until the two halves of the screen stop being two halves.
Colors one after another, for as long as you want. Nothing is timed and nothing is scored.
One color a day, the same one for everybody, worked out on your phone from the date. There are five hundred and fifty five of them, spaced far enough apart that no two days feel like the same puzzle.
A few seconds to look, then the target is covered and you mix it from memory. One peek, ten seconds in.
Included in the unlock
The same colors, held to a tolerance most eyes cannot resolve. This is the one that will keep you there.
Included in the unlock
Photograph anything, point at a color in it, and mix that. When no paint on the tray can reach it, the app says so instead of quietly substituting something close.
Included in the unlock
Zen and Daily are free forever, and they are whole modes rather than a sample of one. A single purchase of $4.99 unlocks the other three, paid once and never again. No subscription, no advertising, and nothing that runs out and asks you to wait.
The first color you match becomes a small creature, in that color. Everything you mix after that feeds it, and its DNA is the strip of every color it has ever eaten, in order. It grows slowly. It sleeps while you are gone. Leave it a month and it dries out, which one round undoes. Nothing here can die, and nothing will notify you to say it misses you.
Every sound is synthesized rather than sampled, and all of them sit in one pentatonic scale, so however they land on top of each other they stay consonant. A drop parting from the tray rises in pitch, the way a small amount of liquid pinching off does. A dollop sounds deeper as it grows. Nothing is loud, nothing repeats exactly, and the audio mixes underneath whatever you were already listening to instead of stopping it.
The paint is drawn as a real wet surface and shaded so that the flat top of a dollop is exactly the color you mixed rather than a lighter version of it. That sounds like a small thing. It is the difference between judging your mix and judging a highlight.
It reads in eleven languages, every control is labeled for VoiceOver, and the type scales with the rest of your phone. Because the distance to the target is shown as a number, a color blind player can close in on a match by reading rather than by comparing.
No account. No sign in. No analytics, no advertising, no tracking, and no networking code in the app at all. The daily color is computed rather than downloaded. Photographs used in From Life are read on your phone and never leave it. Nothing you do in Dollop is collected, because there is nothing in it that could collect anything.
The privacy policy says the same at greater length, and says nothing else.
Because they are two different kinds of mixing. A screen adds light: red, green and blue emitters sum, so blue light plus yellow light gives something pale. Paint subtracts light. Blue pigment absorbs most of the red end of the spectrum, yellow pigment absorbs most of the blue end, and what survives both is the middle, which is green. Dollop mixes the second way, which is why it gives a real green.
Subtractive mixing is what happens when colorants are combined: each one removes part of the spectrum, and you see only the light that nothing absorbed. It is how paint, ink and dye behave. Additive mixing is the opposite and describes light itself, which is what a screen or a stage lamp does. Dollop is the subtractive kind, which is why mixing in it feels like mixing paint.
Yes. Zen and Daily are free forever and are whole modes rather than a demonstration. One purchase of 4.99 US dollars, paid once and never again, unlocks Blind, Precise and From Life. There is no subscription, no advertising, and no lives or energy to wait for.
Delta E is the distance between two colors in a space built so that equal distances look about equally different to a person. A Delta E of 1 is roughly the smallest difference a trained eye catches side by side, and 3 is close enough that most people would call it a match. Dollop shows it while you mix: Zen, Daily and Blind accept anything under 3, and Precise wants under 1.
Neither. There is no account, no sign in, and no networking code in the app at all. Even the daily color is computed on the device from the date rather than fetched, so everyone gets the same color each day without a server being involved. Nothing you do is collected or sent anywhere.
Partly, and further than you might expect. The distance from the target is shown as a live number, so a match can be closed in by reading it rather than by judging two colors against each other. Blind mode, which hides the target on purpose, is the one that will not work.
Eight standing pigments: titanium white, cadmium yellow, cadmium red, quinacridone magenta, ultramarine, phthalo blue, phthalo green and lamp black. Each round hands you six of them, chosen so that the color you were given can actually be reached from what is on the tray.