About Pintado Studio
Pintado was founded with a straightforward conviction: the digital tools available to painters and traditional artists shouldn’t feel like corporate software dashboards, nor should they require giving up the privacy of your personal reference photography to remote cloud servers.
In Spanish and Portuguese, pintado evokes the tangible act of being painted, spotted, and brought to life through pigment. For centuries, artists working in classic ateliers honed their craft with practical preparation devices: Claude glasses for checking value contrast, proportional dividers for scaling anatomy, Albrecht Dürer’s perspective grids, and hand-ground mineral color wheels. These were simple, robust, tactile instruments designed to serve the eye, not distract the mind.
Yet as the digital age advanced, everyday artists seeking simple preparation aids found themselves trapped between two extremes. On one side were bloated, expensive graphic design software suites requiring monthly subscriptions and steep learning curves. On the other were ad-riddled “free” web utilities that secretly transmitted uploaded photos to unknown third-party servers, stored private reference portraits indefinitely, and caused browser lag with heavy tracking scripts.
We built Pintado to offer a better way. Think of our site as a warm, well-lit digital studio bench. Every utility on this domain — from our subtractive RYB paint color mixer to our line art contour generator and proportion grid calculator — operates entirely client-side via the HTML5 Canvas API. When you drop a reference photo onto our canvas, that image never leaves your computer or phone’s temporary RAM. It is never uploaded, never indexed, and never monetized.
Our Studio Mission
Our mission is to empower hobbyist painters, atelier students, watercolorists, and curious makers with free, mathematically accurate, and privacy-respecting studio instruments. Alongside our three browser tools, we publish clear, practical tutorials exploring color harmony, value studies, underpainting techniques, and sight-size drawing methods.
Three Promises to Every Artist Who Visits:
- 1. Zero Server Storage: Your reference photos remain on your personal device at all times.
- 2. Authentic Color Science: We model physical pigment subtraction (RYB) rather than misleading RGB light math.
- 3. Always Free & Accessible: No paywalls, no forced account signups, and full keyboard/screen-reader accessibility.
Get In Touch
Have an idea for a new artist tool, a question about color mixing physics, or feedback on our line art converter? We would love to hear from you. Visit our Contact page to send us a note directly.