Recipe:
1 24oz tub of fat free cottage cheese
3/4 cup of hydrated lime
pigment of choice to adjust color
Rinse and drain the cottage cheese through a strainer to remove the whey, retaining the solids, creating a quark. place the lime in a container and add just enough water to make a paste, wetting all the lime solids. Add in your quark, and mix until dissolved. (I used a cheap Wal-Mart shake blender) Using your pigment solids make another paste and add slowly to the paint base until tinted as you desire. You can also use acrylic artist's paints as pigment. This dries and adheres to bare wood in about 1/2 hour. It cannot be removed even with paint stripper after 12 hours of curing.
Not for a shield but for a old vanity desk for my antique shop. But should work well for that purpose as well.
In Europe, can you buy milk quark without the whey? I know it's near impossible to find quark cheeses here in the States
And there I have been patronizing the old milk paint company! I will have to give this a try as I have lots of pigment about. I agree on the hardness: there is no way this stuff comes off.
Richard,
You may want to add about 50g of borax to the mix, as a mold preventative. From my google and web finds people say the 20 Mule Team borax from the grocery store works fine.
The two photos are after one coat on a scrap of yellow pine and then a second coat. You can see the milk paint is very translucent.
Hmm, I do like the woodstructure showing through. This may look really good on a scabbard. I look forward to you sharing further experiments.
Very nice! If you can, please take a picture of the painted desk so we can see what it looks like.
Yes, quark is popular in parts of Europe, at least. It's a popular breakfast food here in the Nordics, and I also have an absolutely killer German cheese cake recipe that uses it.
The commercial milk paint is much less transparent.
http://www.milkpaint.com/
"As in originally produced home-made milk paint, we use milk protein, lime, clay, and earth pigments such as ochre, umber, iron oxide, lampblack, etc. The lime is alkaline but becomes totally inert when mixed with the slightly acid milk. We use no lead, no chemical preservatives, no fungicides. Milk paint contains no hydrocarbons or any other petroleum derivatives."
OT: 20 Mule Team Borax works just fine for forge welding flux, too. And of course, for your laundry.
Quote:The commercial milk paint is much less transparent.
http://www.milkpaint.com/
"As in originally produced home-made milk paint, we use milk protein, lime, clay, and earth pigments such as ochre, umber, iron oxide, lampblack, etc. The lime is alkaline but becomes totally inert when mixed with the slightly acid milk. We use no lead, no chemical preservatives, no fungicides. Milk paint contains no hydrocarbons or any other petroleum derivatives."
I'm going to use some various additives to test the change in translucence of the paint. My first attempt will be plaster of paris with the current recipe adding in 5 TBSP Plaster of Paris into 2 TBSP water then adding that two two cups of the previous recipe. I'll pick up some plaster of paris on the way home tonight and do some test swatches on another pine board.
The desk I am working on when stripped still has some white milk paint left on it and is very patchy. Someone had tried a shabby chic, distressed look and didn't fully paint the piece. So this translucence isn't good for that piece.
People had expressed interest in photos of the desk I had completed in milk paint, so here they are and photos of a small toy box we completed for our antique booth. Excuse the garish pillow. You may require sunglasses.
Final Recipe:
3.5 cups of quark
112g (3/4 cup) Hydrated Lime slaked in 1.5 cups water
8 oz plaster of paris
1 tbsp Borax (forgot this in my facebook post)
Lime safe pigment to desired color.
Mix the quark and slaked lime. Allow three or more hours of time for the lime to react with the casein(I blended the casein with the slaked lime) After the foam has dissipated then add the plaster of paris stirring constantly. Add in the tbsp of borax and your pigment.
On a clean wood surface or one with milk paint on it this bonds in half an hour. If the surface is questionable try a bonding agent added to a small amount of the paint (1 part white glue, 2 parts paint to five parts water and run a light base coat. After this dries your milk paint should adhere to the surface.
I also made a wash as a final coat (recipe I found on line) 1 qt skim milk and four Tbsp borax. Reserve 1/2 cup of milk. slowly stir in the borax to the skim milk until the solution is saturated. (you'll see borax crystals that don't dissolve) add in the reserved milk and wait about an hour at room temperature. This adds an eggshell satin sheen to your finished product. this takes a little longer to dry than the normal milk paint. you can also add pigment to this to create a glaze effect.
No need for sun glasses. I think they are very Roman colours. They look great.
Indeed. They look very good. Nice job!