More paint testing

And the curse of the little white balls

I’ve been testing quite a few variables for milk paint, with the primary one being which of my local milk suppliers has the best quark yield from their skim milk¹.

These test batches of quark are perfect for making sample sticks for all my newly acquired pigments.

I made a batch recently and was still plagued with the white balls (mentioned in this post).

White balls on a venetian red sample stick. I decided to scrap it and re-make it.

This was around the same time Nick Kroll shared a live stream where he replicated the problem and discussed a few solutions. It’s a great source of info and well worth a watch.

Summary: the white balls are basically solidified lime. His comments confirmed a theory I had regarding why I was only having this issue recently vs when I first started making paint: I swapped from Cal from the local Mexican food mart to a slaked lime from Ace. The Ace lime is not as fine as the Cal, likey containing more lumps.

Ace lime, left, and the Calcium hydroxide (Cal) from the food mart

I tried straining the paint with a tea strainer, and that removed a lot of them, but not all. His other suggestion was to pre-slake the lime and just leave it in water for as long as possible to help break it all down. I mixed up enough lime and water for 6 full size batches of paint and I’ll test it out in the near future. Important note for anyone doing this: slaking lime is an exothermic reaction. When slaking 180g of lime, it got HOT. Not so hot that it burned me, but definitely way hotter than I thought it would.

Meet my new shop companion: Slakey!

To fully test the theory, I went back to La Perla and stocked up on Cal and re-made a batch of base. This paint had zero white balls present.

Re-made Venetian red sample stick using Cal.

There might be some confirmation bias in this but the paint also “felt” better while applying it. I know it sounds weird, but one thing that’s really drawn me to milk paint, outside of the fact it’s a hand made item with no plastic, was the feel of the paint while painting it on. Maybe it’s just me, but it’s completely different than acrylics and has a nicer haptic feedback.

I know I’ve had a lot of paint posts lately but I’m still on the portion of the learning curve that I find the most enjoyable, so thanks for reading. I’m slowly acquiring some carving tools and hope to head down that path soon enough (on top of making more chairs/furniture), so I’ll be sharing more about that as I go.

Next week is spring break, so there will be a small break in posts.

1. I live in Oklahoma so almost all the milk I can easily find is from highland dairy. I recently tested Trader Joe’s and Braun’s skim milk, with the latter being A2, and their yields were a little worse than the highland.