MIX A BATCH AND MEET YOUR MATCH
To match colours you should know basic colour theory and have a knowledge of pigments and how they react with each other. You should be familiar with the four earth colours -- raw sienna, raw umber, burnt sienna, and burnt umber. Eighty per cent of current popular residential colours can be mixed by using one or a combination of these four earth colours, along with white and black for the tints and shades. If one were to add a yellow ochre, thalo blue, thalo green, and fire red to the mix, along with a lemon yellow, yellow oxide, and perhaps a violet (seldom used), then it would be possible in theory to mix any colour that your little heart desires. Note that I didn't say it would be easy... only possible.
These days we mostly leave the fussing and mixing to paint dealers. Their machines dispense colourants with precision and according to formulae, and because of that, whether we need a single can or twenty, we can expect the colour to be consistent across them all.
However, the same cannot be said for mixing colours on site,
because the only formula is the one up there in your head. Mixing
large quantities by hand is tedious, prone to error, and sometimes
wasteful, but tinting a gallon or two should be no problem for a
good painter. This is where prior knowledge
of colour harmony can be brought to the fore and made good use
of.
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Here is the real McCoy.
No Hollywood. No glamour.
No time for props
all shiny bright
to make a point
but work work work
all through the night
in some commercial joint.
Your mission, Jim, should you accept it, is to mix up more of a previously custom-tinted stain.
In the event that you decline your mission, this webpage will self-destruct in... eight... seven... six...
This quart of factory-mixed stain was poured out to a bigger pail for easier mixing. The inverted lid shows traces of the factory colour.
Some stain was held back in the quart in reserve, in the event that the colour mix goes over the edge and into never never land. |
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This shows a full quart of colourant, a bit of which will be added to the factory stain. Painter's colourants tend to be thick (viscous), and are easier to work with when thinned down.
A clean dry paint-stick is dipped into the colourant and then dropped into an empty can to which is added a bit of diluent. Keep the thinning to a minimum - otherwise the transparency will get knocked about.
The paint-stick shown above, while obviously reused many times, is (was) both clean and dry. |
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Being thinned and now easily pourable, this small quantity of strong colourant is added incrementally to contents of the large pail and stirred in.
I have used the word strong here to mean pure. Were this a yellow paint, it would not be pure insofar as it would also contain vehicles, binders, stabilizers, anti-foaming agents and god's nose.
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Here is the target colour.
Note that the colours on both inverted lids are wet. This method of matching one colour to another wet-on-wet saves huge time. No need to hang around in limbo waiting to see the colour of the dry sample - no need to fiddle with the hair-dryer routine.
Before adding a factory stain to the dregs of the last batch, reserve and set aside a half-cup to serve as the master sample. Over the course of a large job, mix and match to this master sample to avoid colour drift.
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Scoot the wet and dripping stick over to the master sample and...
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...drizzle a drop of the emerging colour mix onto a bit of the master sample to gauge your progress. This particular colourant is of average tinting strength, and there is a tiny bit of leeway in mixing a match like this -- a 1/4 teaspoon either way isn't going to matter a great deal.
If you have added too much colourant and the tint has now gone toward never-never land, add some of the starter base to bring it back in line. But don't rely too much on this trick to save your efforts. Because the proportions are now reversed, you will need a lot of base, of which you may or may not have on hand.
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Colourants such as thalo blue, fire red, violet, are high strength tinters -- several or more drops of these at a time can easily be too much.
The weakest tinter that I can think of at the moment is raw umber. It seems that sometimes you can pour RU in there forever and still see little result for the effort.
When the drizzled drops disappear into the old, when the colours merge... you've won!
Time to ask for a raise! |
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Remember that mixing a custom colour is not an all-day event. With practice and experience, a colour batch like this can be mixed on-site in twenty minutes - ten if you hustle - an hour if you are underpaid.
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