Imagine you went into a paint store and ordered an off white paint. The guy mixing it put various squirts of pigment into the can, according to the formula. But it's taking a long time, and the clerk says "sorry, I had to change the white pigment cartridge, alright, 142, 143, 144" plunging the pigment lever full travel everytime.

To spare the arms of those workers, they have different bases of paint. For the off-white your guy would use base 1, which already has 150 squirts of white pigment in it, in our example. The base 2 might already have 60 squirts and the base 3 already has 10 squirts. The base 4 has none.

The paint chip swatches will have a code that says which base they start with and how many squirts of each pigment.

So you will need to look at Glidden paint swatches and ask an employee to tell you how to decode which base a swatch uses.

You're going to find all colors which use that base will have a lower to midrange lightness. For instance olive drab or battleship gray or bright blue might use that base.

It will really help if you like bright or deep colors!

I worked in the paint department of Home Depot way back when and I can tell you that their paint labels list the letter of the colorant in the first row followed by the ounces and fractions of an ounce of that color.

The current label above is newer than what I worked with, and the color names have changed, but that label says that quart of paint has 0 ounces and 126/384ths of an ounce of the DL color, 56/384ths of FL and 6/384ths of RUL.

The different brands format the information in different ways, but it's all going to come down to colorant and quantity. If I had to guess, I would say that your label would have 3 ounces and 22/128ths of W1. Of course you would have to ask what the fraction was because I made up 128th and have no idea what it really is.

You would also need to know the codes for all the colorants. There's probably 8-10 different colorants - it's not just primary colors.