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So, what do you do with all those custom mixed colors?

Hand Lettering topics: Sign Making, Design, Fabrication, Letterheads, Sign Books.

Moderators: Ron Percell, Mike Jackson, Danny Baronian

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Site Man
Posts: 573
Joined: Sun Mar 13, 2005 1:03 am
Location: Marlborough, MA

So, what do you do with all those custom mixed colors?

Post by Site Man »

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Posted by Mike Jackson on December 07, 2001
Raymond just made a note about putting a rubber cover over a can of paint to keep it fresh longer and helping keep the skin from forming so fast.

My question is what do you do with those colors? How long do you keep them? How do you store them?

I don't have a good answer. Just about every shop I have ever been in had a rack or counter filled with little cans of paint from recent jobs with a full spectrum of wonderful, custom mixed colors. The landfills don't want paint cans dumped with liquid paint, so just throwing them away isn't a great idea. We often mixed similar colors together to get a larger can of a unique color. Eventually, you end up with so many cans, something has to be done. How do you handle it?

Mike Jackson / co-moderator


Rick Sacks
As we run out of counter space, all those cans get mixed together. We can then use that paint as a first enamel coat on dark signs and for sign backs.

I apprenticed in a shop that would name that color and try to sell it as "this month's special" for a background color to realtors.
Mike Jackson
Back when paint was less than $10 per gallon, we used to buy a lot of mis-matched paint from Sherwin Williams for $2 a gallon. Sometimes those colors were perfectly useable, just not the color the person had originally asked for when it was custom mixed. If we didn't like the color, we would pour it all into a 5 gallon bucket and use it for the back sides of mdo panels, since most of them were not seen.

We also found that we could give away all the latex paints just by letting the Boy Scouts, Art Departments, Drama Departments, and other non-profits know about it. We could also make a pile of the cans and put it by the street with a small sign that said "Free Latex Paint". It would always be gone by evening. We also have radio show called "swap shop" here every morning. Anything you offer to give away was always taken.

Latex is easy. Our professional enamels are a bit more of a problem because of the possibility of lead in the paint. I believe some still have it, so giving it to the Boy Scouts for little craft projects probably isn't a good idea. We mix all the similar colors together, and end up with Gary Anderson colors! You know, slightly grayed and muted, but still attractive if used correctly!

Have a good one,
Mike Jackson
Mike Jackson - On Gallons
We use a lot of a light ivory color for the same real estage company and many of the other businesses. The town sign code prohibits pure white for some reason, so everything has to be off white or ivory, light gray or whatever color "isn't white". Knowing that, we try to mix our gallons of light ivory using 50% white and 50% ivory. At least we can get close from batch to batch. We sometimes do a 25% ivory and 75% white mixture by using a single quart in a 3/4 full gallon of white. Deep green was three quarts dark green and one quart black.

If we didn't do this, we ended up with lots of slightly different hues of light ivory or dark green, all in gallon cans with about half a quart left over.

Mike
Billy Bob
Look out, the white paint police are closely scrutinizing dirty looking white signs! How wacky is that?!
A traditional use for left over colors has been to mix 'em all together into a funky brown, and paint the back of signs with. I sometimes paint "faux" experiments or "art" with leftovers. Using (only) standard from-the-can colors eliminates having weird leftovers and/or difficult color matching situations.


Mike Jackson
The Sign Police are for real here. The "white background" issue has caused problems, mainly because each new sign inspector has in/her own interpretation of what white or yellow is. When we first moved here, the sign inspector told us to put a piece of white typing paper on the background color. If it looked different than that, it was okay. We got a Pratt & Lambert color called "Linen" approved one time, which was pretty light and then used that color over and over. The new sign inspectors are giving the people that own our shop a hard time right now over a color called "goldenrod". It is the color of a manila ochred clasp envelope. Not my problem!

Mike Jackson
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