Six months later, you still know how you painted it.

The problem every painter has

Nobody writes their recipes down. You tell yourself you will remember the four paints and the two washes, because right now, with the pots still open on the desk, it seems impossible to forget. Then the army sits finished for a year, you buy the character that goes with it, and the shade of the armour is a complete mystery. The usual fallbacks are a blurry photo, a half remembered video, or a guess that never quite matches.

A recipe book fixes this, and a notes app is not a recipe book. What you need is the paints themselves, in the order you used them, attached to the models they were used on.

Thousands of real paints, already in the app

HobbyArmory ships with the actual colour ranges: Citadel, Vallejo, The Army Painter and other major brands, thousands of paints in total. You build a recipe by picking the paints you used rather than typing their names, which means no typos, no guessing whether it was Mephiston or Khorne Red, and a book that stays searchable years later.

• Step by step structure: basecoat, shade, layer, highlight, and whatever else you actually did
• A note on each stage, for the thinning ratio or the brush you used
• One finished photo per recipe, so you can see the result next to the steps
• Recipes pinned to specific miniatures in your collection
• Share a recipe as text, as a link, or as an import straight into someone else's book

Pinned to the models, not filed in a folder

This is the part a notes app cannot do. Because HobbyArmory already knows every set and every miniature you own, a recipe is not a loose document. It is attached to the models it painted. Open the Intercessors in your collection and the scheme is there, on the unit, where you will actually look for it.

The same link works in the other direction. When you plan the next batch in the army builder, the recipes for that army come with it, and as you finish models your painting progress updates on its own.

The Paint Rack knows what is on your shelf

A recipe is only half the answer. The other half is whether you can actually paint it tonight. The Paint Rack is a paint inventory built into the recipe book: mark off the paints you own, keep a wishlist of the ones you want, and add your own custom paints and mixes. Once it knows your shelf, every colour in the app comes with matching paints from the brands and from your own rack, so a recipe you found online turns into a shopping list of the three pots you are missing.

Around the rack sits a set of colour tools. They run on real colour maths rather than comparing hex codes, and when nothing in the catalogue is genuinely close the app tells you so instead of recommending a bad match.

• Convert: the closest colour in another brand's range, for one paint or a whole recipe at once
• Mix: what two paints really make when you blend them, so you can reach a colour you do not own
• Wheel: how well your paints cover the colour space, and where the gaps in your collection are
• Ladder: one colour turned into the highlights and shadows that go with it
• Scheme: a full palette built from a single colour, saved straight to a recipe
• Palette from Image: the colours pulled out of a photo, with Noir and Values views for contrast

Palette from Image is the one worth trying first. Add a photo of a model you like, and the app works out which colours are in it and matches each one to real paints. Tap a colour and it is outlined on the photo, so you can see exactly which parts of the model it covers rather than guessing from a row of swatches.

Paint from the recipe, with the clock running

Painting mode turns a recipe into something you work through rather than something you read. Steps tick off as you go, and a timer runs in the background while you paint. Building counts too, so the evening you spent clipping and gluing a box is on the record alongside the painting.

It all adds up per recipe and per miniature, which is the only honest way to find out what a ten model squad really costs you in evenings. Sessions keep counting if you close the app, and an interrupted one can be picked back up instead of started again.

Free while it is in beta

The recipe book is part of the HobbyArmory beta on Android and iOS. Everything is unlocked and it costs nothing to use. If you have years of schemes locked in your head, this is the cheap way to get them out.