Painting is an essential skill for getting started in boats. But it isn’t a slap-it-on-and-forget-it panacea. We want to disabuse you of the Army-base approach to painting: “If it moves, salute it. If it don’t, paint it.” Painting demands planning, craft, and good chemistry, and it isn’t “just for pretty.” Paint does some serious work.
Traditional paint began with available pigments such as soot, rust, powdered minerals, and oxides of some metals. Beyond color, paint needs a binder that will fix the pigment permanently in a matrix of long-chain molecules. Some traditional paint used the clotted and strained solids of milk containing casein compounds. “Milk paint” was an interior painting standard for centuries, since it has little weather resistance, and its nontoxic qualities have renewed interest in the old practice. It could be thinned with water but had an interesting caveat: paint quickly, because milk paint spoils as quickly as milk.
Natural oils such as linseed oil (from flax) were another matrix. Metallic driers were often added to reduce the weeks-long polymerization of raw linseed oil. The driers are usually toxic and certainly to be avoided in children’s furniture. One of these driers, lead, has been illegal in paint formulations for decades.