61–70 of 100 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you apply any mud to smooth the surface before you painted the apartment?
As needed, but once I got to bare concrete/whatever it was remarkably smooth. I chipped off the ceiling slowly over weeks, avoiding gouging.
Paint, as understood by oil painters and artists, sounds like a slightly different animal than paint as understood by house painters, wood finishers, and other sorts of people with more prosaic requirements of their paints. Bob Flexner wrote a book for wood finishers, Understanding Wood Finishing, that breaks down oil paint in simple terms for the rest of us: Some oils (like linseed and walnut) are drying oils, and c…
A friend of mine had his house repainted and the contractor farmed it out to some idiots. They painted all of the windows shut. No one noticed until after the paint had dried.
It's as solid a glue as you could want. :-)
(As anyone who's been sloppy and lazy with a can of paint knows.)
Labor has become more expensive than parts, for many aspects of home repair. We haven't adapted our habits to this. The last time I let my university landlord paint my apartment, it took days to clear the furniture, and I was instructed to do no paint prep. There were peels coming down from the ceiling. The painters exploited this "paint is glue" theory by painting under the peels and pushing them flat. I channeled m…
> 15 years later, the apartment looks just-painted Curious what you mean? In my experience, new paint coats are needed because of marks left on walls -- accumulated smudges, scuffs, furniture bangs, nicks, filled anchor holes, etc. None of which higher-quality paint has anything to do with... I assume? Am I wrong? Assuming paint is applied correctly in the first place, what are the longevity benefits of using a highe…
Labor has become more expensive than parts, for many aspects of home repair. We haven't adapted our habits to this. The last time I let my university landlord paint my apartment, it took days to clear the furniture, and I was instructed to do no paint prep. There were peels coming down from the ceiling. The painters exploited this "paint is glue" theory by painting under the peels and pushing them flat. I channeled m…
Additionally, art acrylics are typically very thick, to allow the artist a high degree of flexibility in application density, a flexibility that's just not needed for wall application. You correctly note that labor is the major cost for house repair. In light of that, it strikes me as silly to buy a bunch of extra-thick art paint and take the time to thinning it down the the appropriate consistency for wall application, instead of just buying a volume of paint that was already at the appropriate viscosity.
An acrylic-latex intended for outdoor use is going to be formulated to account for the fact that exterior surfaces see wider temperature swings in the summer and winter, and will be more flexible in its final cured form, reducing the flaking and cracking caused by the temperature-driven expansion and contraction that comes with the seasons. The formulation is also likely to account for the greater UV exposure its going to have outside. If you try to coat the exterior of your house with art paints, you're going to be spending a lot more money, it it might not last as long than if you used a paint intended for the purpose.
Now, if your goal in either scenario is art or aesthetics, than that's a completely separate discussion. If you want the wall of your house that faces the local park to be a mural highlighting fundamental truths of the human condition, more power to you. Though, in that case, you might do better to eschew pre-forumlated paints entirely, and instead buy the raw outdoor-use formulated resins and pigments yourself, and mix as appropriate.
> The last time I let my university landlord paint my apartment, it took days to clear the furniture, and I was instructed to do no paint prep. There were peels coming down from the ceiling. The painters exploited this "paint is glue" theory by painting under the peels and pushing them flat. I channeled my desire to kill them on the spot by politely escorted them out in mid-job and never letting anyone paint for me again.
Okay, that's just sloppy work. I'd have wanted to kill them too. When I was painting commercially, if I or my supervisors had caught anyone doing that, said slacker would be off the crew permanently.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
Thanks for the link instead of a downvote, never seen this post.
I'm not sure what that means for me personally.
Paint, as understood by oil painters and artists, sounds like a slightly different animal than paint as understood by house painters, wood finishers, and other sorts of people with more prosaic requirements of their paints. Bob Flexner wrote a book for wood finishers, Understanding Wood Finishing, that breaks down oil paint in simple terms for the rest of us: Some oils (like linseed and walnut) are drying oils, and c…
Maybe if you saturate the wood, let it dry, and then keep adding additional coats, you'd start to get one. But, in a world where varnish exists, I'm not sure why you'd do that unless you were trying to reproduce a period technique or something.
Dough is edible glue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 15 years later, the apartment looks just-painted Curious what you mean? In my experience, new paint coats are needed because of marks left on walls -- accumulated smudges, scuffs, furniture bangs, nicks, filled anchor holes, etc. None of which higher-quality paint has anything to do with... I assume? Am I wrong? Assuming paint is applied correctly in the first place, what are the longevity benefits of using a highe…
Some white paint goes an off yellow colour over time, particularly gloss paint.
Paint, as understood by oil painters and artists, sounds like a slightly different animal than paint as understood by house painters, wood finishers, and other sorts of people with more prosaic requirements of their paints. Bob Flexner wrote a book for wood finishers, Understanding Wood Finishing, that breaks down oil paint in simple terms for the rest of us: Some oils (like linseed and walnut) are drying oils, and c…
basic linseed oil takes ~70 years to cure properly. pure linseed does, in time, a nice hard firm.
there are a number of plant oils for painting (saffron, sunflower, walnut, linseed, poppy: different dry rates and hardness rates), and there are a number of ways for treating them. Specifically we usually avoid plain boiled linseed oil, as it tends to yellow. That is, I believe, the common hardware store oil paint.
fundamentally - artist oils are engineered for divergent purposes than house oils.
resins are hugely variant - artists are usually suspicious of things that aren't engineered & tested to last > 50 years, so house painting probably has a much larger variety.
the pigments affect the oil dramatically. quinacridone pigments stay wet for days, if not weeks, whereas umbers (due to the manganese) will dry within 24 hours.
with respect to varnishes, that's not how oil painting artists think of varnishes: a traditional varnish is dammar resin dissolved into (pure) gum spirits of turpentine, laid on about 6 months after the painting is touch-dry. Today we typically use a acrylic varnish with a UV protectant, i.e, what's sold under the trade name "Gamvar". Such modern varnishes are designed to not link against the oil and permit stripping and reapplying to use as a protective layer.
it's technically correct to call oil paint colored glue, I think. But it's not useful to think of it that way. I think of it as "oily mud applied with a hairy stick" when I feel reductionist.
I love talking about artist oil paints, happy to answer any other questions.