Created by the
Shell Film Unit in 1967 and directed by
Michael Heckford, "
Paint" takes a look at the creation and formulation of paint, and traces the history of paint and its components from the paintings of the
Stone Age to the present day.
A great deal of the focus on the film is industrial paint and its application, used to prevent corrosion and wear, and making everyday things more durable.
Synthetic pigments are shown, as are oil paints, and many other pigments.
In
2011,
South African archeologists reported finding a
100,000-year-old human-made ochre-based mixture that could have been used like paint.
Cave paintings drawn with red or yellow ochre, hematite, manganese oxide, and charcoal may have been made by early
Homo sapiens as long as 40,
000 years ago.
Ancient colored walls at
Dendera,
Egypt, which were exposed for years to the elements, still possess their brilliant color, as vivid as when they were painted about 2,000 years ago. The
Egyptians mixed their colors with a gummy substance, and applied them separately from each other without any blending or mixture. They appear to have used six colors: white, black, blue, red, yellow, and green. They first covered the area entirely with white, then traced the design in black, leaving out the lights of the ground color. They used minium for red, and generally of a dark tinge.
Pliny mentions some painted ceilings in his day in the town of
Ardea, which had been done prior to the foundation of
Rome. He expresses great surprise and admiration at their freshness, after the lapse of so many centuries.
Paint was made with the yolk of eggs and therefore, the substance would harden and adhere to the surface it was applied to.
Pigment was made from plants, sand, and different soils. Most paints used either oil or water as a base (the dilutant, solvent or vehicle for the pigment).
A still extant example of
17th-century house oil painting is
Ham House in
Surrey, England, where a primer was used along with several undercoats and an elaborate decorative overcoat; the pigment and oil mixture would have been ground into a paste with a mortar and pestle. The process was done by hand by the painters and exposed them to lead poisoning due to the white-lead powder.
In 1718,
Marshall Smith invented a "
Machine or
Engine for the Grinding of
Colours" in
England. It is not known precisely how it operated, but it was a device that increased the efficiency of pigment grinding dramatically.
By the proper onset of the
Industrial Revolution, paint was being ground in steam-powered mills and an alternative to lead-based pigments was found in a white derivative of zinc oxide. Interior house painting increasingly became the norm as the
19th century progressed, both for decorative reasons and because the paint was effective in preventing the walls rotting from damp.
Linseed oil was also increasingly used as an inexpensive binder.
In 1866, Sherwin-Williams in the
United States opened as a large paint-maker and invented a paint that could be used from the tin without preparation.
It was not until the stimulus of
World War II created a shortage of linseed oil in the supply market that artificial resins, or alkyds, were invented.
Cheap and easy to make, they also held the color well and lasted for a long time.
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- published: 15 Jul 2015
- views: 592