How artist paints are formulated and manufactured

I wanted to share a couple videos to our painting audience that I found while surfing YouTube the other day. The first video is from a program on the Discovery Channel called "How it's Made" and in the four minute segment it details the formulation and manufacturing of Windsor and Newton oil paints. I found the video to be quite interesting because it shows you how much must happen before those magical little tubes get into our creative hands. I am quite addicted to this program too and somehow it makes me a bit nostalgic of "Mister Roger's Neighborhood" and the field trips he'd take his viewers on to see how something was made. The beginning of this video is also great, because it features many of the raw materials that are used to create the pigments. Pigments are what make the paint a specific color. If you've ever wondered why certain colors such as Cadmium Red cost more than others like Burnt Umber, it's because the materials the pigments are derived from may be harder to obtain or more expensive in their raw form. I'll explore pigments further in a later post about artist and student grade paints.

 

In the studio at ArtsyU, we use acrylic paints to recreate our artwork, which are a bit different from oil paints featured in this first video. For acrylics, the process of manufacturing is very similar, but there are different ingredients, specifically the ingredients used as a binder, which is the substance used to make the pigments all stick together and to the canvas. Instead of using linseed oil like in oil paints, acrylics use an acrylic polymer emulsion as a binder. The polymer emulsion is water based, whereas the linseed oil is oil based.

The second video I listed demonstrates how paints can be made at home with just a few simple tools and ingredients. This is the perfect video for an adventurous DIY crafter who likes to experiment in a tactile way! After watching it, I know I really wanted to try this myself sometime. In this short clip, the speaker Alex Warren, who is also the founder of Sinopia Pigments, discusses the functions of pigments, water, and the role of a binder in acrylic paint. He then demonstrates their relationship to one another as he makes "homemade egg tempera paint" by hand. The binder in this video is actually an egg yolk. The great masters like Leonardo De Vinci and Michael Angelo might have used this technique when they created the paints for their masterpieces! Pretty cool thought!