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Color Chips

After wanting to do this for ages, I’ve finally taken the time to mill up a heap of wood swatches for color chips. I work a lot with milk paints, an old-fashioned and very tough type of paint that wears like iron and is non-toxic when dry. I’ve never had samples of all the different colors, which makes choosing colors a bit of a crapshoot, especially when I’m looking for ones that will combine well. Hence this project.

To get a feel for how each color behaved on different background woods, I made a stack of 16 chips each in poplar (left), walnut (center) and cherry (right). Most of the paint colors had decent coverage on all 3 woods, but the cherry surprised me by leaching its own pigment into some of the lighter paint colors

Everything is painted now. I still have to sand each chip smooth, since the milk paint has a gritty surface. Once they’re sanded, then I’ll label and oil them and get on with the bowls I was planning to paint when I finally got fed up with not having color samples of my paints.

Whenever you do a job that involves lots of repeated steps, you tend to accumulate piles of parts, sub-assemblies or, in this case, stir sticks. Those parts and pieces can make lovely patterns all by themselves, that have nothing to do with the final product.

I was curious how the color of the powdered paint would match either the oiled or sanded-but-unoiled samples. Some of them were almost identical to the s-b-u samples, but some matched neither one.

Finito! All are oiled. I’m going to give them a little while to soak up any excess oil (I gave them a good rub with paper towels, but there’s always a little oil left on the surface) and then find a box to keep them in. I’m already intrigued by a couple of the colors that didn’t look promising in dry form but are very nice with oil, and it’s fantastic being able to shuffle the chips around to see what the colors look like in combination. Hooray!