Paint – Making Paint

Paint is essentially pigment and a binder. The pigment is the coloring material; it can come from many sources, rocks – furnaces, chemistry labs. Binder is what holds those pigment particles together and holds them to the surface of the painting. The binder is often referred to as the vehicle. Think of the vehicle as what carries the pigment  from point A to point B. Water can be a vehicle, but has no binder function because once the water evaporates, the pigments are just dust again. In the case of oil paint, linseed oil (typically) is both binder and vehicle. Acrylic paint’s binder/vehicle is an acrylic polymer emulsion. Watercolors have a water soluble gum, gum arabic, as their binder.

In making paint, we want to evenly disperse the pigment into the binder. 

You may hear someone talk about grinding paint, but what we’re actually doing is mulling. Grinding makes the pigment particle size smaller and we’d do that before mixing with the binder. The tool above, the glass muller, could be made of glass, granite, or some other hard stone. In the image below, I’m in Rembrandt’s studio in Amsterdam, mulling paint. Rembrandt’s house is not to be missed if you’re in the Netherlands. They have someone on staff who demonstrates making paint in the traditional manner. I couldn’t help but ask if I could sit at the slab and make some paint.

Verfmolen ‘De Kat’ in the Netherlands grinds pigment in this windmill. What results is dry pigment, not yet paint.

Below are a couple videos on commercial processes of making paint.

Here’s a link to Revolution in Paint, discussing the role of technology in the Impressionists’ work.