Stop paint mixing by feel, that cost me a whole wall

I used to mix paint colors by eyeballing it, adding a little of this and a splash of that until it looked right. Last Tuesday in Phoenix, I tried matching a light gray for a touch-up job and ended up with a stripe of purple-gray across the living room. Now I measure every drop with those little mixing sticks and write down the ratios. Anybody else have a color matching disaster that made you swear off guessing?

2 comments

2 Comments

sean_foster528d ago

Hold on, did you check if the original paint was still good before you started mixing? Because I made that mistake once. Paint that's been sitting for a few years, even if you stir it real good, can have the pigment settle in a weird way from all the temperature swings in the garage. The base color might look fine in the can but when it dries it's totally different because the pigment particles are clumped up or something. So it might not be your eye that was the problem, it could be your paint was just too old. That's the angle nobody talks about, they always blame the mixer.

jennifer_west8d ago

Actually that brings up something I noticed with old paint that nobody really talks about - the binder can break down too, not just the pigment. I had a quart of Behr that was maybe 4 years old and looked fine when I stirred it, but once it dried it had this weird sticky tacky feel that never quite cured right. The temperature swings in my garage must have wrecked the acrylic binder over time. Did you ever run into that issue where old paint just doesn't bond to the surface the same way?