When it comes to interior design, and design for the outdoor areas of your home like garden furniture, porches and decking, there is a new trend in painting and wood staining that is catching on very quickly. This is using ‘milk paint’, rather than regular paints and stains. Here, we look at what milk paint is, where you can use it, and how it can help you add color and beautiful effects to your home without harming the environment in any way.
What is Milk Paint?
Milk paint is a type of paint inspired by old world ways of making paint, using curdled milk, lime and earth pigment. These paints would be made at home, often with recipes passed down through generations. Of course, now you can get commercially prepared milk paint, so you don’t need to worry about mixing it or finding the right pigments for the color that you’d like to use – there are a vast range of colors available making it just as flexible as other kinds of paint.
Why Is It So Environmentally Friendly To Use Milk Paint?
Milk paint is made from all natural, non toxic, biodegradable ingredients. Forget about the problems with safely disposing of the leftovers of toxic paints – if you have unused leftover milk paint you can safely just throw it on your garden!
While it is completely non-toxic, the only real precaution you need to take with milk paint is to make sure it doesn’t go in your eyes or on your skin – the lime in it can be an irritant, so you’ll need to wash carefully and thoroughly if this happens to avoid any stinging or reddening.
What Can Milk Paint be Used for?
You can use milk paint for all kinds of home projects. As it can make a good wood stain, you can use it to stain floors, decking, porches, and furniture like tables or bookshelves. It can also be used to paint walls, so you can use it instead of other styles of paint for your interiors.
Milk paint can also be used to create a cracked effects, so you can make some cool antique looking pieces using it. Milk paint can be used for some art projects too, though it is not very flexible when dry and may crack on canvas, so if this is not an effect you want it may not be the best choice for creating paintings.
Coatings
You can apply any kind of top coat you want to milk paint if you want to protect your finished paint job. Bear in mind though that oil based top coats can darken the color, so try a top coat on a test area to check you like the result before coating your whole project.
Milk paint can be a great eco friendly way to add color to your home, so why not check it out! You may even prefer it to regular paint once you’ve tried it.
1 Comment
Ah, so this is how people paint antique looking pieces. It’s pretty cool that milk paint can be used for painting my walls and for painting furniture. Having paint that I can use for different projects seems like a great way to help me save money. This way, I can paint my cabinets to match my walls without spending more money on paint.