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Date Posted: 22:58:22 08/12/08 Tue
Author: BB
Subject: DIY paint

I read that you're doing a bit of painting Ani. That prompted me to tell the following story. I meant to do it a couple of weeks ago but forgot.

I'm a paint chemist. I've been making resins and formulating and testing paints for over twenty years. It's a bit of a passion, really. Recently I saw a wee poster in a bank advertising a two-hour course on "natural paints", run by a government-sponsored consultancy company. I e-mailed the contact address and signed up for it. Ten quid! You can hardly buy a bag of chips for ten quid these days so it seemed like good value (bit of an exaggeration there. I've switched on the anti-exaggeration tool in my web browser to stop me doing it again!).

The course was held on a Saturday morning in an old market town about six miles from where I live. Bleary-eyed from the usual Friday night consumption of Ozzy wine I managed to find the shop where the course was to be held. This shop was a New-Age-hippy-groovy kindae place. Sparkly things on strings dangling everywhere and bottles of aroma-therapy oils on shelves. Anyway, up a staircase behind the shop is an astonishing and unexpected delight. A medieval hall preserved and restored with money from Cadw, the Welsh Heritage Agency. It has minstrel balconies and magnificent fireplaces at either end. This was the venue for the course.

I arrived a few minutes late and was informed by the young lady running the course that I was the only participant! No other bugger had signed up. Much to my surprise she said that the course would go ahead anyway. One-to-one training for ten quid! You can't even buy......(rest of sentence deleted by anti-exaggeration tool).

We made paint from curds prepared by adding lemon juice to milk. This was the paint binder. Borax was added as a preservative and sunflower oil to improve durability. Various mineral pigments provided different colours. I came home with jam jars filled with green, purple and yellow "natural paint". Also some sheets of cardboard that I had brushed the paints onto to see how they looked. Pretty damn good I must say!

Mrs BB was semi-impressed. After showing her the cardboard sheets I propped them on a chair and went to put the kettle on. Mrs BB shouted that she thought there might be a flaw with this type of paint. I came back into the living room to see our dog frantically licking the paint off the cardboard sheets with huge slavering sweeps of her amazingly long tongue.

Bugger!

My plan to paint the living room with natural paint shrivelled up as I envisaged coming home to find the paint vanished from the walls from the floor up to a line that would be suspiciously dog-high. The collie in the corner with the bright yellow tongue would have been the only additional clue needed to work out what had happened.

Just as well Mrs BB spotted the flaw in advance. If only she wasn't so bloody pleased about it!

In conclusion, the paint is pretty good. It would work well on ceilings and other unlickably-high surfaces, unless you have a pet giraffe.

P.S. I have recipes for these paints. I'm going to persist with fine-tuning them. Making them would be great fun for children. If anybody would like the recipes, let me know.

BB

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