Iddings Deep Colors is made from ground pigment with a casein binder.  It has a big advantage over any other paint that doubles as a disadvantage.  That is, you can go home for the night and let it dry and come back in the morning and rewet it and work with it some more. 

The disadvantage of this rewetting property is best shown in a personal story.  I had a sad experience once, when I was working summerstock.  We were going to reuse some flats from a previous year, and took them out of storage and into the parking lot where we did a lot of our building and painting work.  It was a hot and humid kind of place to work, but there was plenty of space.  At the end of carrying them out, we noticed that the orange of the flats was coming off all over our sweaty hands and clothing.  They had most likely been painted with Iddings paint and never sealed.  The paint treatment they were headed toward had nothing to do with orange, so we had to seal the flats before we could even start painting them, otherwise the orange would have tried really hard to work its way up into the wet paint we were applying. On top of that, because we had spread orange all over the shop from working with the flats, we found ourselves periodically covered in orange for the rest of the summer. 

This paint is also the one that produces my least favorite rotting paint smells, and it definitely rots more quickly than other scenic paints.  All paint smells a little different when it rots, and I think this is the worst.  Casein is a relative of milk in that it is a soy based product, and that is probably why it smells worse than rotting plastic.  Of course, that is personal opinion. 

A really wonderful advantage to this paint is that it is flexible, so it won’t chip as easily on painted drops that get folded and other things that want to move.  It also has the flattest, least shiny finish, but not if you add sealer to it.

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.