You get 30 of each of the following colors to add to your items like armor, weapons, and saddles, drag the dye over the item you want to color. Items that are able to be colored will be highlighted blue in your inventory as you drag the dye. After this a menu will open where you can select the region of the item that you want to color, each region requires one dye.
Black
Blue
Brick
Brown
Cantaloupe
Cyan
Forest
Green
Magenta
Mud
Navy
Olive
Orange
Parchement
Pink
Purple
Red
Royalty
Silver
Sky
Slate
Tan
Tangerine
White
Yellow
To color your items like armor, weapons, and saddles, drag the dye over the item you want to color. Items that are able to be colored will be highlighted blue in your inventory as you drag the dye. After this a menu will open where you can select the region of the item that you want to color, each region requires one dye.

Coloring structures requires a Paintbrush or a Spray Painter.

To use the Paintbrush, place the desired color onto it. Then, you can click on the structure you want to color and again select which part of the structure you want to dye (color region). The brush contains 10 charges of the selected color, so you can paint more than one structure part with it.

The paintbrush is also used to apply war paint to tamed creatures and players, or access the save/load images functionality. See Painting for more information.

To use the Spray Painter, place the desired color into it as you do with a paintbrush. To color a structure, stand in front of it and press LMB.svg Left Click (PC), XboxOne RT.png Right Trigger (Xbox One). If you hold the alt-fire button Right Click RMB.svg(PC) and then the number keys 1-6, you can select which color region you want to dye. On Xbox/PS4, this can be done by holding Left Trigger/L2 on PS4, and pressing D Pad Up, D Pad Right, D Pad Down, D Pad Left for Color Regions 1 - 4. Holding Left Trigger/L2, Left Bumper/L1, and then pressing X or Y/Triangle or Square on PS4, will enable and disable Color Regions 5 or 6 respectively.