Radford's Cyclopedia of Construction

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: House Decoration Difference between Color and Paints In interior work, paint is employed chiefly for decorative and ornamental purposes; and these we shall now consider in detail. It is necessary that the student and worker in paints should clearly understand the difference between the two terms pigment...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: House Decoration Difference between Color and Paints In interior work, paint is employed chiefly for decorative and ornamental purposes; and these we shall now consider in detail. It is necessary that the student and worker in paints should clearly understand the difference between the two terms pigment and color, oftentimes confounded. Color is but a sensation aroused in the mind or consciousness through the action of light upon the nerve-fibers of the retina. Pigments, on the other hand, are substances which, when acted upon by light, absorb certain of the rays of color therein contained, and, by either reflection or transmission, give forth that particular color by which they are known. It will readily be understood that the distinction between color and pigment is not in any way a distinction of terms only. The house-painter, however, deals with pigments, color being the resultant effect. The term pigment, as already mentioned, implies the substances or materials that are laid upon surfaces to impart color; and the laws that govern the mixing of pigments are not identical with those that control the blending of colors. For instance, the addition of yellow pigment to blue will result in a mixture having a green hue; although theunion of blue and yellow colors will result in white. It will be well at the commencement of this chapter to state briefly the meaning of the principal technical terms used in the text, so that the subject may be plain to the reader's understanding. Pigment is any coloring substance or material from which a dye, a paint, or the like may be prepared; the term is applied particularly to the refined and purified coloring matter ready for mixing with an appropriate vehicle. Oil-color is a paint made by grinding a coloring substance in oi...