Make Fresh Milk Paint

Product Description

By Nick Kroll 

Make your own fresh milk paint using household materials, a little hydrated lime and any colour pigment your heart desires. Cost: about $6 for a quart of paint – and 10 minutes' work.

Woodworker Nick Kroll spent two years formulating and testing his recipe for fresh milk paint, which is based on historical recipes for casein paints – plus a little modern ingenuity. The paint goes on like an acrylic and dries fast – you can put on four coats in a day with no problem. Once dry, the paint has a low luster and hardens to become incredibly durable.  You can then leave the paint as-is or topcoat it with wax, oil or whatever you prefer.

Most of all, you can make paint in any colour you want with inexpensive powdered artist pigments. Take a deep red from the soil in Ercolano, Italy, where Pompeii is located. Use a sage green from France. One of the many ochres that colour our world. Or select one of the many synthetic pigments that create colours not found in nature. All these pigments can be mixed to create any colour of paint.

In the 100 page pocket book, Nick shows you how to make the paint using kitchen equipment (a blender, household sauce pot and a strainer). The paint is made with a base of fresh quark – a protein-loaded cheese you can buy in many stores. If you can’t find quark, you can make it easily using skim milk and vinegar. Mix water, a little hydrated lime, the quark and your pigment, and you have paint that is ready to go.

Since Lost Art Press started editing “Make Fresh Milk Paint,” they’ve made dozens of batches of the paint using Nick’s recipe and are amazed and impressed with the results. They love powdered commercial milk paint, but this is a different animal altogether.

The book offers complete instructions to make the paint, suggests some pigments to help you get started and offers all the encouragement and confidence you’ll need to get make your perfect paint at home.

Like all Lost Art Press titles, “Make Fresh Milk Paint” is produced and printed in the United States using domestic materials. Lost Art Press use only library-grade bindings. That means signatures that are sewn together, glued and backed by fiber tape. The book block is then wrapped with high-density endsheets and heavy cloth-covered boards. The book is 100 pages and measures 4" wide x 6 1/2" high.

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