About Team 513 Paint Diary
Team 513 Paint Diary is a platform to share useful information and knowledge about what we learn in the Paint Shop. To start our diary, we would like you to know more about “your paint”! Some paints dry fast, some paints carry poignant smell of alcohol. Have you ever wondered what is inside a can of paint? What makes the spectrum of color you ever imagined to be painted on your cozy bedroom wall? Let us tell you more about what composites your can of paint.
What Is Inside Your Paint?
There are 5 basic components of paint: binder, solvent, pigment/ colorants, extender/ filler, and additives. A can of high-quality paint should consist of a higher percentage of binder and pigment; and a lower percentage of filler and water than low-quality ones. Naturally, binder and pigment are 2 crucial components to determine the quality of paint. Binder, as known as resins/ polymers, gives the properties of glossiness, durability, flexibility and toughness of paints. Binder per se is a chemical, for instances, acrylic polymers and epoxy polymers. It can only become useful when combines with solvent to form vehicle, which determines the characteristics of a paint such as slow or fast drying. There are 2 major types of solvents: water based and solvent based. You can easily distinguish them by how the paint smells: if it is odourless then it is water-based, if it has a pungent smell then it is the latter one. Does your paint dry fast? If yes, it is of high chance water-based. Otherwise, it is solvent-based. 
How about the color of the paint? Do they come naturally? Sure! Pigments can be naturally produced by animals or vegetables. They can also be synthetically manufactured! Popular examples are Alizarin and azo-pigments. These 2 types of pigments are organic that they are composed of carbon compounds. Inorganic pigments have mineral origins. Very often, they are metal compounds such as oxides. Natural inorganic examples are umbers, ochres and siennas; while synthetic inorganic ones are cadmium yellow/ orange/ red, cobalt blue and titanium white. Another component of paint is filler. Its percentage in paint can determine the quality of the paint as mentioned earlier. It serves to thicken the film and support its structure. Fillers are usually cheap and inert materials like chalk and clay. Hence, higher proportion of fillers in paint reduces cost as it can increase its volume.
Here comes the last component in paint: additives. Normally, additives make up only approximately 3-4% of a can of paint, be it high or low quality. Yet, additives have huge contributions to make your painted cozy bedroom wall clean and less depreciative. Common additives are but not limited to: silicones to improve weather resistance, driers to accelerate drying time, anti-settling agents to prevent pigment settling, and fungicides and algaecides to protect exterior paint films against disfigurement from moulds, algae and lichen.
Photo from Pinterest
Choose Your Suitable Paint!
Photo from Maison DFH Interior Design Another reputable brand is Argile: a high-quality paint brand from France. It is well-known for 2 unique qualities: made by a dedicated color designer and manufactured “naturally”. The color collections are designed by a color specialist, Pierre Bonnefille. All colors are designed to go harmoniously together, you can randomly pick any 2 or 3 or 4 colors from the collection and see how miraculously blue, brown and green can look very coordinated. Environmental-friendly enough, they use sunflower oil instead of acrylic resin, which is a petroleum bi-product, as binder. Hence, Argile paints are manufactured using over 95% natural ingredients.
Photo from Archello
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