im trying to make an image scanner with the pen blocks but it only gets the very top of the sprite's colors correct and the rest is a really weird color

Why are you ghosting Scratch cat - surely that leaves nothing to scan?

A useful trick for a scanner is to first scan the whole screen with a large costume to detect the colours that are actually present. Then instead of scanning every pixel for over 16 thousand colours you may find you're only scanning for a few hundred.

Scanning the whole screen pixel by pixel may be too much for a ‘no screen refresh’ custom block to cope with. I'd be wary and scan a smaller area at a time at least until you've checked whether this is a problem.

i was using the ghost effect to hide scratch cat so you can see the pen draw him didn't think that would affect the touching color things since it doesn't affect the touching sprite things

`touching color` uses the color on the screen. Ghosting a sprite changes its color on the screen.