paint experiments

in my quest for the easy and the cheap i have happened upon home-made paint. i guess making your own paint really isn't as easy as going to the hardware store and buying it, but it's a lot more fun and is less expensive. best of all this paint is non-toxic, made from common things like milk, eggs, lime and, for my tests, rust (iron oxide).

my friend danny loaned me a book called the natural paint book by lynne edwards and julia lawless. today i collected materials and made five kinds of paint. i tried them out on my studio wall, as you can see. i did have to prepare some things in advance, namely curd cheese (also known as quark) and lime putty.

you make quark by putting lemon juice or vinegar (something acid) into skim milk, place the mix somewhere warm and wait half a day or so. my first batch didn't work because i mixed it cold. i heated the next batch and it worked a lot better. you then strain the curds from the whey with cheescloth laid in a strainer.

lime putty is available in the u.k. ready-made. in the u.s. it's harder to find that way, but you can make a facsimile with type-s hydrated lime, available at building supply stores. you first put the lime in a bucket, add water, mix til it's smooth and then let it sit making sure there's water covering the mix. the longer it sits the better. i've let my mix sit a day and, yes, it's kind of like putty. back in the old days they'd let it sit for years!

so, now the fun part. you get to make paint. the first thing i tried was quark and pigment. mixing the two together i was skeptical. the mix was chunky. but, when i brushed it on the wall the chunks smeared onto the wall smoothly. the paint is tranlucent but dries flat. brushwork shows providing opportunity for interesting overlapping texture.

next i tried quark and oil. i mixed five parts quark to one part oil then added pigment. the mixture was substantially different from the quark only mix. it went on thinner and dried with an eggshell finish.

next i tried quark and lime. this created a kind of gritty paint, more opaque than the others. it dried flat.

last i tried pure lime and pigment. this went on super thick and opaque, very solid. it dried much lighter than the others, though, kind of mauve where the others were clearly dark red. it also comes off a bit when you rub it. the others do not.

i've ordered bulk pigments from realmilkpaint.com and hope to be painting away next week.