The Economy of Using Good Colours.
—It may be taken as a safe rule for the painter to follow that where a good job is required the best materials only should be employed, but the reader may answer to this that the price paid to him for his work will frequently not permit of his doing this. We may then leave the subject an open one which has really no place in these pages, except in so far as it relates to tinting colours, and here we can definitely and positively assert that it pays the painter best to use the best qualities of colour, quite irrespective of whether he gets a high price or a low price for his work. We must now proceed to explain this. Let the reader assume that a large surface is to be painted a very light Prussian blue. The price for the work is fixed and the question to be determined is whether it will pay to use cheap Prussian blue or one of high quality. Assume that a high quality blue costs 2s. per pound, and that just one pound of it is sufficient to tint the whole white to the required shade. We are purposely giving a simple case so as to make the matter clear. Now a Prussian blue can be bought for, say, 1s. 3d. a pound, but it would probably consist of at least one half of barytes or some other adulterant, which is of no value whatever as a tinter. If this colour is half strength it is obvious that two pounds of it would be required to tint the white for the work in hand, and this would cost 2s. 6d., against 2s. for the better class colour. This homely example should be taken to heart by every painter. He has only to experiment to find out that it never pays to use inferior tinting colours. Of course there is another reason why the best quality should be used, and that is, the appearance of the inferior colours is always muddy and unsatisfactory.