paint/finishing question...

[xxsimply_becausexx]

Hey Builders,

has anyone ever tried using watered-down paints as a stain of sorts? Such as mixing a small can of water-based paint (since oil based won't mix) with a cup or two of water to thin it down to more of a varnish or stain. I'm currently working on a custom speedboard (possibly for the new contest) and wanted a "orange-ish" stain but couldn't find anything that I was content with. But i did find the color I was looking for in a paint. So.... that's my problem. Any tips or tricks I should know of?

PHil

[Loki440]

ok the answer is no and yes

but let me explain, first off acrylic paint is of course a colored material ground up and suspended into a aqueous solution, but this is the problem with using it as a stain, first off the particle of color are too big to be effectivelly absorbed into the wood properly, second inorder to get a decent strength stain you would need a stain composed of color particles that are really really fine thus light will bend around them, instead of creating an opaque solution, in other terms for how much you would need to thin it, you would dilute the stregth of the color so much that it wouldnt even be useful.

So useing just a normal acrylic paint to try to stain wouldnt be very effective due to the paint particle size and makeup, now here is the exception, if using a Translucent paint you can do two things, first it can be used as a stain as one its already see-through but there is alot of color due to the color being made of really fine particles and or tints, so its possible to stain that way(latest board with the black figured angires center strip was done that way), now second what you can do is first seal off the wood with a couple coats of clear and then paint on a coat of the translucent paint, gives the color you want but still allows you to see the wood figure.

But there are many places out there that supply wood dye that you could mix up in a custom fashion to get the color you want, ideally dyes are the way to go unless you can achive the effect you want with translucent paint(they give slightly different effects, dyes will create dark wood grain areas for more contrast due to those areas being at a different grain angle and also those ares usally suck up more stain, now translucent paints with just alter the color leaving the wood figure underneath the same.

here is an example of a board done with translucent paint