The house paint usually acrylic or the emulsion paints is used as fillers or bulking agents. Professional artist-grade acrylics are used to give lightfast color pigment/ colors to the paint. This will make an economical batch of paint that you can use for a long time and on many surfaces including flexible surfaces like canvas.
Using house paint instead of artist acrylic paint- what you need to know
At some point in your art journey, you might wonder if you could use wall paints or house paints for artwork instead of acrylic paint. To answer this question, I researched on the internet, asked artists who have used house paints for art, and even contacted manufacturers for their expertise. Here is what I have found.
In general, you can use wall paint or house paint for artwork usually on a rigid surface. You can mix light color house paint with artist acrylic paint to increase the archival quality. Artists in the past from Pablo Picasso to Jackson Pollock have used house paints in their artwork.
Art is very versatile and there are no hard and fast rules to follow. You can use anything to create art either artist acrylic paint or house paints. However, there are a few things you need to keep in mind when going for some nontraditional art mediums to make your artwork look its best.
Can you use wall paint/ house paint for art?
You can use house paint or wall paint in your artwork depending on the final finish you want with the painting. If you want an even, flat finish of colors that has an economical approach, it would be best to use good quality house paint in your paintings.
How to Sponge Paint
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However, making art is not the intended purpose of house paints. House paints are generally used on walls and other surfaces of the house where repainting would be done every 3 to 5 years. So it has no guarantee that house paint would last for many decades or centuries to come.
There is a difference between house paint and artist acrylic paint in their characteristic depending on why they are made and to whom they are tailored. Even though good quality house paint has worked for many other artists and they have lasted for many decades, you need to remember not to expect things from house paints that house paint is not made for.
Difference between house paint and artist acrylic paint
Acrylic house paints are specifically made to paint on rigid surfaces like dry walls, concrete, wood, etc, as they are less flexible. Artist acrylic paints are more flexible and they can be painted on flexible surfaces like canvas as well as on rigid surfaces. Artist acrylics are expensive while house paints are cheaper.
Artist acrylic paints are also loaded with pigments while house paints have fewer pigments and are mostly made from fillers and even fewer acrylic binders than, artist acrylics. That is why house paints are less flexible and artist acrylics are more flexible. The less pigment there is, the intensity and color saturation will also be lower. However, house paints provide smooth even coverage of color.
There are different types of house paints. The main types we use today are acrylic and latex house paints. Acrylic house paints come as 100% acrylics. Acrylics are the type of binder that binds all components of acrylic paint together. Latex paints are originally made by using latex rubber.
But today most latex paints also use acrylic polymer binders like Vinyl Acrylic, Polyvinyl Acrylic, and Styrene Acrylic. But if acrylic paint is used 100% it is called 100% acrylic paint. Also, it is recommended to repaint walls every 3 to 5 years because the colors can fade or wear out over time.
Artists’ acrylic paints are specially made to create archival quality artwork. They are made from lightfast pigment that can last for many decades and even a century. However, there are different qualities of artist acrylic paints.
Professional acrylic paint has the highest quality and archival nature. It has more vibrant colors and is also the most expensive of all. Student grade and craft quality paints are lower in quality, have less vibrant colors, and may even have low archival quality but are less expensive.
Scientific Examination of Art: Modern Techniques in Conservation and Analysis (2005)
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Suggested Citation:“Paint Media Analysis–Michael R. Schilling.” National Academy of Sciences. 2005. Scientific Examination of Art: Modern Techniques in Conservation and Analysis. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11413.
Paint Media Analysis
Michael R. Schilling
The Getty Conservation Institute
Pigments and organic binding media are the two principle components of paint. Whereas pigments impart color to paint, it is the role of the organic binding media to bind together the grains of pigment and adhere them to the work of art. Synthetic polymers are the binding media of choice for most of today’s commercial paints. Nevertheless, the continued use by contemporary artists of such natural products as egg, milk, animal hides, vegetable oils, plant gums, waxes, and natural resins (which were the only binding media available from antiquity through the end of the nineteenth century [Kühn, 1986]) attests to their durability, versatility, and working properties that artists value.
Conservation scientists are often called upon to analyze organic binding media and pigments in painted works of art. Knowledge obtained from the study of artists’ materials and techniques enriches our understanding of the history of art, informs the decisions of conservators who must develop appropriate conservation treatments, and reveals compositional changes in artists’ materials brought about by age, weathering, and environmental factors. Although many instrumental analysis techniques now exist for identifying organic substances, several key factors limit the actual number of techniques that are suitable for identifying organic binding media. To begin, typical samples removed from paintings weigh in the range of 1 to 50 micrograms; in many instances the medium simply may be present below instrumental detection limits. Mixtures of organic binding media may present problems of overlapping signals. Physical aging and pigment interferences may complicate data interpretation by changing the original composition. Moreover, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to resolubilize some organic binding media (such as egg tempera) once they have become dried into
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Suggested Citation:“Paint Media Analysis–Michael R. Schilling.” National Academy of Sciences. 2005. Scientific Examination of Art: Modern Techniques in Conservation and Analysis. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11413.
paint films. For those instrumental techniques that are capable of detecting organic binding media, application of simple qualitative analysis limits the extent to which the analytical test results may be interpreted.
Quantitative gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) is one of the few analytical techniques capable of overcoming the myriad of problems associated with identification of natural organic binding media in painted works of art. In research at the Getty Conservation Institute, quantitative GC-MS procedures were developed for identifying organic binding media based on proteins, oils, and plant gums. The procedures were validated on test paints that were subjected to two types of artificial aging (six weeks at 80°C and 500 hours in a Weather-O-Meter light exposure chamber at 50 percent RH and 50°C). The present study illustrates the utility of quantitative GC-MS in the study of paintings by two prominent American artists.
A TECHNICAL STUDY OF PAINTINGS BY JACOB LAWRENCE
Jacob Lawrence was known for his simplified, brilliant graphic forms that depict African American history and experience (Steele, 2000). Throughout his long career he favored working in various water-based organic binding media commonly referred to as tempera: casein, egg, plant gums, and animal glue (Mayer, 1940). It is known that Lawrence mixed some of his own tempera paints from artists’ recipe books, whereas in many of his later works he used commercially available tube colors. Manufacturers often add materials to tube colors, in addition to the binding media, to modify the working properties of the paints and stabilize the mixtures. These additives include glycerol, seed oils (such as linseed, poppy, and walnut), natural resins (dammar, rosin), phthalate plasticizers, and sugar. From these lists it is quite clear that Lawrence’s paint media may be complicated mixtures of many substances (Steele and Halpine, 1993). It should also be noted that it is nearly impossible to differentiate these tempera media based solely on the appearance of the painted surface, yet because this is sometimes the only means available to museum registrars when cataloguing their collections, these records are sometimes erroneous.
Recently a technical study of samples from a number of Lawrence’s paintings (see Table 1) was undertaken to learn more about his painting technique, check the accuracy of museum archival records, and contribute to a catalogue raisonné of Lawrence’s paintings (Schilling et al., 2000). Pigments were identified in the paint samples using polarized-light microscopy. Some samples were tested using Fourier transform infrared microspectrometry (FTIR) to identity the paint components.
To test for proteinaceous media in paint samples, amino acids were liberated by acid hydrolysis and analyzed by quantitative GC-MS in the form of (tert-butyl-dimethylsilyl) derivatives (see Appendix A for experimental details) (Simek et al., 1994; Columbini et al., 1998; Schilling and Khanjian, 1996a). The quantitative
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Suggested Citation:“Paint Media Analysis–Michael R. Schilling.” National Academy of Sciences. 2005. Scientific Examination of Art: Modern Techniques in Conservation and Analysis. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11413.
TABLE 1 Jacob Lawrence Paintings Analyzed in This Study
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Blind Beggars, 1938
National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.
Painting the Bilges, 1944
New Jersey, 1946
Men Exist for the Sake of One Another, 1958
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
African Gold Miners, 1946
The Cue and the Ball, 1956
Playing Card (Joker) or (King), 1962
Harriet and the Promised Land No.10, 1967
In a Free Government, 1976
Worcester Art Museum
The Checker Players, 1947
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Struggle Series No.11: Informers Coded Message, 1955
Ordeal of Alice, 1963
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Street to Mbari, 1964
Daybreak-A Time to Rest, 1967
Merril C. Berman Collection
Students with Books, 1966
Jacob and Gwen Knight Lawrence Collection
Other Rooms, 1975
results for the alkyl- and imino-substituted amino acids (the so-called “stable” amino acids) were normalized to 100 mole percent. The quantitative yields for the other amino acids are often unreliable due to pigment interferences in the hydrolysis and/or derivatization procedures, or due to aging (Halpine, 1992; Ronca, 1994; Schilling and Khanjian, 1996b); these amino acids were excluded from the final dataset.
Samples tested for plant gum media were hydrolyzed in trifluoroacetic acid, and the monosaccharides were analyzed as O-methyloxime acetate derivatives (see Appendix B for details) (Murphy and Pennock, 1972; Neeser and Schweizer, 1983). For comparative purposes the monosaccharide dataset, excluding glucose and fructose, were normalized to 100 weight percent.
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Suggested Citation:“Paint Media Analysis–Michael R. Schilling.” National Academy of Sciences. 2005. Scientific Examination of Art: Modern Techniques in Conservation and Analysis. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11413.
Test Results for Jacob Lawrence Paintings
Table 2 lists the quantitative stable amino acid test results for the Lawrence paint samples with those of several common proteinaceous and plant-gum-binding media included for reference (the reference data originated from inhouse tests and from published sources [Schilling et al., 1996]). Carbohydrate compositions for selected Lawrence samples and various reference materials are listed in Table 3.
Using the method of correlation coefficients, the quantitative stable amino acid composition for each sample was compared to those of the common binding media in order to find the closest match, as listed in Table 4 (Anderson, 1987); the same method was employed for identification of plant gums (see Table 3). Most samples correlated very closely either to glue, egg, casein, or gum arabic. In two paint samples, however, there were indications in the test data that two proteinaceous media were present. This situation may arise either because the artist intentionally mixed two binding media together in the paint, or because the paint sample was contaminated with medium from a second paint layer (this last situation occurs frequently in samples from egg tempera paintings that have ground layers mixed with glue). And so, for the two Lawrence samples, simple algebraic equations were used to find the most likely pair of proteinaceous media that gave the closest correlations to those in the paint samples (Schilling and Khanjian, 1996c). Thus, the red from Blind Beggars had a 0.99 correlation to a mixture (1:2) of casein and glue, whereas the green from Sedation had a 0.95 correlation to a mixture (1:3) of casein and glue.
In general, good agreement was evident between the analytical findings and the medium attributions in the museum archives. One notable exception was the detection of glue as the medium of Playing Card, which had been previously misidentified in the archives as plant gum. Another exception was Street to Mbari, which had been assessed visually as having a gouache medium.
GC-MS was useful for detecting components in the paints that were unrelated to the protein or plant gum media. Some samples revealed the presence of commercial paint additives, such as Struggle Series Number 11. The brown paint contained egg medium plus high amounts of glycerol, gallic acid, and rosin; this formulation is consistent with an artists’ tube color (Steele, 2000; Steele and Halpine, 1993; Schilling et al., 2000). Moreover, a few samples showed evidence of biodeterioration of the paint medium. For instance, oxalic acid (a common byproduct of microbial activity [Matteini, 1998]) was detected in the dark paint from The Checker Players. It may be that the relatively poor quality of the correlation for the medium in this paint to the reference materials (0.91 to casein, 0.74 to egg) may be due in part to the effects of biodeterioration.
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Suggested Citation:“Paint Media Analysis–Michael R. Schilling.” National Academy of Sciences. 2005. Scientific Examination of Art: Modern Techniques in Conservation and Analysis. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11413.
