In this mini game, I put four artists (including me) through a brutally simple oil paint test: you get three minutes to mix a color that matches my purple Crocs. The lavender Crocs are basically the secret mascot of Studio SLEW, so they’re the perfect target—this weird, not-too-saturated “mystic purple” that looks easy until you actually have to land the value and saturation. What I love about this challenge is how it exposes the real fight of oil painting: you spend more time on the palette than the canvas. One artist had more oil experience and talked about constant matching as the whole job; another only started oils a couple months ago but came in with a primary-palette strategy. Meanwhile, I did the classic mistake—dumped in too much red and blue, ran out of white, and then realized you can’t exactly “take pigment back out.” In the end, we do a side-by-side test, I rank the mixes, and we crown a winner. The takeaway: oil color mixing is hard, desaturation is sneaky, and over-tweaking can ruin a color you already had.