Quoting Sgt42RHR@a...:

> Nope, not milk paint, oil paint.  If one imagines how that green would  age
> after 150 years or so, then one might imagine how we get the muted colors
> often represented as Colonial.

Something no one has mentioned yet is that American colonial period and 
following paint recipes used lead oxide as the opacifier, which is 
generally frowned on these days.  Lead oxide oil paint with generally 
available pigments (light on the lead since it's expensive so the paint 
is slightly translucent) turned out to be very conveniently mimicked by 
milk paint followed by several coats of linseed oil.

Those who read Dunbar's book too fast think milk paint was the original 
on the Windsor chairs, it's a very good non-poisonous reproduction of 
the effect.  The Old-fashioned Milk Paint dry sacks have done well by 
me _except_ for yellow on oak. I finally figured out water plus some 
flavor of iron oxide (yellow ochre) plus tannic acid from oak is why 
the oak parts turned black underneath....  IIRC one shade was worse 
than the other but I would avoid either on oak.  Red (red ochre 
colored) on oak was no problem.  Reds, blues, greens, and black are all 
fine in my experience.

No bug/mold issues but them I don't live in a jungle, but it has been 
known to be hot and humid periodically.  The layers are pretty thin, 
and have BLO on top with all the nice heavy metal driers to poison 
microbes.

My eyes recognise a lot of milk paint colors as available from standard 
pre-coal tar pigments available in most cases for millenia (ochres, 
verdigris, lampblack, cobalt blues).

Esther

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