I'm currently teaching kids how to make fairy houses out of natural materials (the roofing went well. I'll try to update that thread soon. I forgot to take pictures today).
Anyway, most of the students already painted their wattle & daub houses with milk paint.
Picture taken before we made roofs. So many pretty colors!
But, not all the kids had a chance to paint their houses. Some were sick or absent. And, have one student who is allergic to milk. Milk paint is full of the casein that most milk allergies are based on. I'd like to make a paint that's (A) Easier to make than having to warm up milk, add vinegar, wait 8 hours, and wait for it to strain, and (B) is something my student with milk allergies can use.
I was wondering about adding lime to pigment and gum arabic. Earlier in the school year, I had my students write their names in hieroglyphs. I was initially going to have them paint on wood...but the wood I had was dark. It looked terrible painted! So, I decided to plaster it. Then the kids would get to paint on limestone like the Egyptians. They'd make their own limestone cartouches!
When I did that plastering, the first thing I tried was just mixing water with hydrated lime powder and applying that to the board. It just dusted right off when dried. So, I thought, "What if I add gum arabic?"
I couldn't find anything online telling me not to add gum Arabic, so I gave it a whirl. It worked! The lime stuck to the boards (albeit a bit gritty because the lime wasn't slacked), and it took a lot of coats to turn it white (largely because lime isn't that opaque). But, none of it dusted off, and the kids were able to draw and paint on the limestone boards without issue.
When I get a chance, I'm going to take pictures of said limestone Egyptian cartouches and post them here. I'll also try to share any results of the pigment + lime + gum arabic experiment.
Has anyone else tried painting daub/cob with lime + pigment + gum Arabic paint, or something similar?
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