If you are missing a color for your Diamond Painting, you can use a website to find the nearest color to replace it with. The people who run the website tool I am going to talk about here are called Thread-Bare and what is used to find colors is a tool they call “Closest DMC Thread-Color Lookup Tool”. As the name suggests, it is made for DMC embroidery thread, but since Diamond Painting uses DMC color codes, it works just as well for it.

How does the tool work?

It’s web based and all you have to do is go here: Closest DMC Thread-Color Lookup Tool. Once you are on the website, you can either click on the color you want to see the nearest color suggestion for or you can enter the number yourself.

DMC number 1-35
List of all DMC numbers you can select to find similar DMC numbers for.

If you enter the number yourself, it is done below the picture with all the numbers, in the box after where it says “Thread Code”. You can then select one of seven different algorithms to calculate the nearest color. Then it shows similar colors. The first color is the one you have chosen and then comes the one that is most similar. Then the other most similar to the original color and so on. As you can see in the picture below, DMC number 3819 is a pretty good replacement for DMC number 12.

number 1-35
“Closest DMC Thread-Color Lookup Tool” provides suggestions for similar DMC colors.

To think of

The thing to keep in mind when using this tool is that colors are displayed differently depending on which screen you are looking at. So the shades may differ from reality. They also write that you should keep in mind that depending on where on the motif you are going to replace colors, you may need to think about whether a shade darker or lighter actually works. It also depends on what other colors are used in the near vicinity. So you need to think about how the whole will be.

Another thing to keep in mind is that it can look really wrong if, for example, you replace DMC number 12 with 3822 and you already have DMC 3822 on the canvas. So keep that in mind when looking for a replacement color.