Replies

1. 
   GregGibson | Jul 18, 2003 05:03pm | #1

   Sell 'em on crown molding, Phill !  Think outside the box !

   Greg.

2. 
   DaveRicheson | Jul 18, 2003 05:38pm | #2

   Phill, go to your local paint store and get an oz. or two of several of thier universal colorant tints. Thats the stuff you see them squirt in the can when they custom mix a color for you. It is just raw pigment ground up and dispersed in ethylene glycol, and is used to tint both water and oil base paints. You will need to take some small jars to put it in, and they may charge a little for each colorant, but they last forever and a little goes along way.

   The store employee can give you a good idea of what tints are used in thier off whites, ivory, ceiling whites, and antique whites. Ussually they use yellow iron oxide, raw umber, burnt umber, lamp black, thalo blue, and the list can get pretty long. Just a few drops in a cup of white paint will give you a an idea of which direction you need to go. Paint a piece of white poster board with your attempted match and force it dry with a heat gun or blow drier. Hold the dry sample up next to the ceiling you are trying to match. Make your next "hit" with colarant in the sample cup, and repaet untill you have a visual match in the same lighting conditions of the room.

   The color matching process is a little slow to start with, but once you do a couple, you get a good feel and eye for colorants, how much to add and so forth to get a real close visual match.

   You probably do something very similar with wood stains already, so this should be pretty easy for you.

   The easiest way is to take a sample of the old color to the paint store for an insturemental match, but with wide variation from room to room that could be expensive. I would choose the cleanest looking ceiling and match it first and then move on to the progressively darker ones, ussing the same quart or gallon of base white.

   E-mail me and I can tell you more than you ever wanted to know about color matching paint. I was a lab tech in a paint product developement lab for seven years.

   Dave

1. 
   PhillGiles | Jul 18, 2003 07:59pm | #3

   Okay, I'll give that a try - they sell little squeeze bottles of the tints locally. The guys at the paint store weren't helpful concerning formulae, they can print off a formula from their computer, but they're not even sure what it means, let alone how to convert it to small quantities.

   I've done military minitures, scale models, trains, even architectural models, but that always involved mixing various colours of paint, not tinting a sizeable container of white; I never even thought much about it until this suddenly came up, and whoa, how do you do that..

   Phill Giles

   The Unionville Woodwright

   Unionville, Ontario

1. 
   DaveRicheson | Jul 19, 2003 05:10am | #4

   The guys at paint store have formulas that call for 1/5 oz. of colorant A and 1/4 oz. of B, and so on for each color in the enventory. Even though the colors are now dispensed by a computer controled squirter it is basically the same as the old hand plunger  dispenser that they used years ago. You don't need to know the amount of each colorant, just the pigment type. They do know that inspite of any claim not to.Sombody has to fill up the machine when it runs oyt of color A,B,C....

   I can get small jars filled at HD just by asking and paying $.50 per jar. The art supply stores are selling acrylic color paste at many time the cost of paint store colorants. I keep a few basic colors around for tinting everything from glazing putty to changing the tone of some stains. I have even tinted some of the glazing coats my wife uses when faux painting.

   Buy a gallon of flat white and pour about 6 oz. in a paper cup. Add a drop of tint, mix, and see what you get. The quantities are small and if it is not what you want, you didn't ruin a whole gallon. A few practice cups later and all the mistique about color matching will be gone.

   Good luck, Dave