Sunday, August 13, 2017

Better Paint Mix and Second Coat on the RH Upper Wing

When I mixed a new batch of light green, I realized I had made some mistake with my spreadsheet for calculating the pigments.  It was causing the quantities of pigments to be so low the paint was watery.  I had seen this with the red, blue and black, but it was much worse with the green.  I spent the morning re-measuring all my pigments by weight and volume to determine their density.  I needed this to correctly convert my weight (gm) measurements into volume (ml) measurements so I could use measuring scoops.

When I first mixed the colors I had access to a very accurate scale.  All I have now is a small kitchen scale which is not accurate enough to measure such small quantities.  Most of the pigments come in 175 ml jars so I have large enough quantities to work out the density with the kitchen scale.
The densities are:
Lamp Black                     0.17 gm/ml
Aluminum Powder           0.27
Prussian Blue                  0.55
Alizarine Crimson            0.66
Litopone                         0.83
Burnt Sienna                   0.87
Chrome Yellow                0.87
Chrome Orange               1.18

 When I mixed the colors I used about 4 times as much pigment as my attempt with the Light Green, which was what I found with the black.  The colors still match and the paint covers much better.
The color mixes here are for Light Green, Beige, Red and blue.  Each has about 25 ml of pigment for a quart of Poly-Tone.  The Alizarine did not want to mix well with the Poly-Tone but the color seems to match my old samples.
 We had another warm dry afternoon so I started the numbers on the lower left wing, and did the red and blue on the roundels.

The upper right wing got a second coat on all the colors.  The red and yellow need another coat and then I can outline the numbers.

After 26 years it's nice to see this paint job getting close to being done.  I really like the look.



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