MIX A BATCH AND MEET YOUR MATCH To match colours you should know basic colour theoryand have a knowledge of pigments and how they react with each other.You should be familiar with the four earth colours -- raw sienna, rawumber, burnt sienna, and burnt umber. Eighty per cent of currentpopular residential colours can be mixed by using one or a combinationof these four earth colours, along with white and black for the tintsand 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, andperhaps a violet (seldom used), then it would be possible in theory tomix any colour that your little heart desires. Note that I didn't sayit would be easy... only possible.
These days we mostly leave the fussing and mixing to paintdealers. Their machines dispense colourants with precision andaccording to formulae, and because of that, whether we need a singlecan or twenty, we can expect the colour to be consistent across themall.
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 abigger pail for easier mixing. The inverted lid shows traces of thefactory 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 whichwill be added to the factory stain. Painter's colourants tend to bethick (viscous), and are easier to work with when thinned down.
A clean dry paint-stick is dipped into the colourant andthen dropped into an empty can to which is added a bit of diluent. Keepthe 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 smallquantity of strong colourant is added incrementally to contents of thelarge 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. | |
Here is the target colour.
Note that the colours on both inverted lids are wet. This methodof matching one colour to another wet-on-wet saves huge time. No needto 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 lastbatch, 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. | |
| Scoot the wet and dripping stick over to the master sample and... | |
| ...drizzle a drop of the emerging colour mix onto a bitof the master sample to gauge your progress. This particular colourantis of average tinting strength, and there is a tiny bit of leeway inmixing a match like this -- a 1/4 teaspoon either way isn't going tomatter a great deal.
If you have added too much colourant and the tint has nowgone toward never-never land, add some of the starter base to bring itback in line. But don't rely too much on this trick to save yourefforts. Because the proportions are now reversed, you will need a lot of base, of which you may or may not have on hand. | |
| Colourants such as thalo blue, fire red, violet, arehigh strength tinters -- several or more drops of these at a time caneasily be too much.
The weakest tinter that I can think of at the moment israw umber. Sometimes, it seems you can pour RU in thereforever and see little result for the effort. week weekweek. When the drizzled drops disappear into the old, when the colours merge... you've won! Hit up the boss for a raise! | |
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Remember that mixing a custom colour is not an all-dayevent. With practice and experience, a colour batch like this can bemixed on-site in twenty minutes - ten if you hustle - an hour if youare underpaid.
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