I’m so pleased with how our home-made paints have worked out. It seemed a bit “out there” when I first read about diy house paints in a straw bale building book, but as soon as I started trying recipes I was hooked.
When painting straw bale walls, it is essential that the paint is vaper-permeable, and most commercial paints are not. So rather than spend a small fortune on high-end specialty paints, I was delighted to find out how good the home-made versions could be, while only costing $5-$6 per litre (depending on the quantity and type of coloured oxides used).
There are numerous recipes online and in diy books for homemade house paint, and we decided to go with a casein based paint, this Harley Farm Paint is just like what we wanted: https://vimeo.com/62199908
So here’s the base recipe I came up with after a fair bit of tweaking:
Goat Milk Paint
In a saucepan warm: 1 ½ cups lime water
120g goat milk soap shavings
1tsp salt
160g Chalk
In new bowel mix:
4 cups quark
1 ½ cup linseed oil
Add up to 160g pigment
Blend both mixes together.
Keep paint cool and use within a couple of weeks, or it will curdle.
There are a heap of different recipes around, Earth Pigments has some which were helpful to me, and their Quark making tutorial is just how I make mine (Link here: Milk Paint) though I need to use a greater quantity of white vinegar to get a good curdle as the cheap vinegar I have isn't particularly strong.
The soap could be replaced with more quark, but it does add more washability and I figured it was a good way to get extended use from our Spring glut of goat's milk.
Once I’d settled on the paint base, my first colour experimentation was to see how close to primary colours I could achieve with the lime-stable oxides I had easily available.
The type and quantity of coloured oxides affected the thickness/opacity of the paint considerably, and while the deep, dark colours applied with fabulous coverage, the paler tones are more translucent and need multiple coats but create a lovely suede effect when applied with random criss-cross brush strokes.
We are using 3 colours throughout our house (plus a commercial low-voc flat white used on ceilings and above the dado rails) and each bedroom will have one feature wall unique to that bedroom.
1. “Caramel”:
1batch of paint (2L)
30g white oxide
1 3/4 tsp sandstone oxide
we have used this as the base coat on all the internal rendered walls, the paint fills the smallest undulations and flattens the texture of the wall a bit so the top coat is a little different.
2. “Cream”:
1batch of paint (2L)
100g white oxide
1/2 tsp sandstone
We are dry brushing this lightly over the surface of the internal rendered walls, which brings back the depth of the textured walls by lightening only the highest parts of the texture.
3. “Coffee”:
1batch of paint (2L)
60g white oxide
5 tsp sandstone
1/8 tsp brown
1/8 tsp black
This paint still bemuses me. In the tub, it looks the colour of bland weak milky coffee, but once dried on the walls it looks really similar to our “caramel”, just a little richer than the finished effect on our bale walls.
Pictured sample squares:
Top left: interior rendered wall finish.
Top right: interior plasterboard finish
Bottom left: wet area tadelakt render colour - to be a highly polished waterproof surface.
Bottom right: exterior render.
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