Robert Garrett

Well I have been busy recently making paint. I obtained one of the Paint Making kits and read the paint making instructions in the catalog.

After obtaining a dust mask, and a pair of suitable gloves..

I began by making a slurry of silicone carbide and grinding that for a while with the muller on the piece of glass included in the kit. It didnt take nearly as long nor as much silicone carbide as I thought it would before the entire piece of glass was nice and frosted. I ground it for less than 5 minutes to get it to that state. The other thing that I learned was that it doesnt take pressure just move it around in little circles and it works great. Another tidbit that I found was the table I was working on in has a place where the halves are joined together and it wasnt exactly flat. That doesnt work to well. So I moved over off of that spot on the table and it worked very well.

The next step was figuring out what kind of oil to use for what pigment.

I decided that I would start with the titanium white I bought when I bought the paint making kit. For the sole reason if I messed this stuff up I really wouldnt care. I have a nice tube of titanium ground in linseed oil so I thought I would use walnut oil for my first attempt at making an oil paint.

The kit comes with a rather large bottle to dispense oil out of so I poured a small bit of walnut oil less than a quarter cup into the bottle and put the lid back on and sat back down to premix the titanium with the oil. I started this proccess by adding a drop of oil and attempting to mix it with the pigment, it took several drops of oil to get something that resembled a dry crusty ball of white. I attempted to mull this and it worked it just didn't get to the consistency I was looking for so I added a couple more drops of oil and mixed it up with the palette knife. A few more minutes with the muller and it was just the way I wanted it.

The next step of the process is to put your freshly made paint into a tube. I grabbed the knife that had come with the paint making kit and scraped up a bit of the paint and put it in the tube and scraped it on the edge of the tube so the paint stayed in the tube. I then repeated this a couple times and found that I needed to pound the other end of the tube on the table a few times to get the paint to settle into the bottom. It did and I continued to fill the tube. I was apparently enjoying this as I overfilled the tube. So that when I flattened the tube to close it paint came out. I scraped the excess paint onto my palette and closed the tube by folding it over and rubbing it with the knife. I repeated this process three times.

Now for the real test I invited my wife to try our new titanium white paint ground by hand with walnut oil. So she did and she loves it. I think she was just being nice when she said it was the nicest paint she had ever used though.


To answer some questions that I had before I began this process, the first of which is just how much paint will 100 grams of pigment make. It really depends on the pigment but at this point it appears that you should have enough to fill a 50 ml tube with a bit left over with most of the pigments included with the kit.

So far my experiments have been with the following..

Malachite - I ground this in a mixture of oils Pale grinders oil, Aged refined linseed oil and a touch of epoxide oil
Flake White - Pale Grinders oil
Cyprus raw umber dark - cold pressed linseed oil
Nicosia Green Earth - cold pressed linseed oil with a touch of epoxide oil
Burnt Sienna - cold pressed linseed oil with a touch of epoxide oil

I have greatly enjoyed both the paint making process and painting with these paints.

RG