Our products
Linseed oil paint dries satin/gloss£35 per litre, and thus more expensive than champagne.
can be ordered as 500ml, 750ml or larger quantities.
TwoTree varnish (generally for use outdoors)
£22 per litre
Pre-treatment oil (raw or boiled)
£8 litre if bought with paint, any quantity
Beeswax toughened with tree varnish
£8
How does it arrive?
Your paint will come pre-mixed and in a tin, unless you ask for oil and pigments to come separate. If the pigments are shipped dry, the onus will be on the purchaser to mix correctly.Why is linseed oil paint so expensive?
Damned if I know, is my immediate answer, because linseed oil is really quite cheap (check out the price of 500ml bottles in an ironmongers). From Swedish and Finnish competitors, you will find linseed paints selling from £30 to £50 per litre (which makes our paints cheaper). Possibly the high price is related to the high cost of living in Scandinavia. Nothing from Lappland's neighbours is going to be cheap. Our paint is extremely expensive because we are more interested in tougher, longer-lasting, quicker-drying paint than on pure eco-credentials (if we are over 95% green, that's enough for us). So our paint base includes tung oil, which is more expensive than linseed oil, and pine resin, which helps prevent mildew growing on the paint.Perhaps the main reason our paint is expensive is that it is made by two men and a dog in an old shed (or is that two old men in a new shed?). In other words, we make no major savings by bulk purchasing and nothing is automated. We do everything in slow motion and this intensive labour adds to the cost of the paint. On the plus side, it means that we can try to match the colour of your choice without it becoming prohibitively expensive.
Choosing a colour
Standard colours. Our standard range are the quickest to produce. The standard colours are very poorly matched on our colour monitor and should not be trusted. In real life, the colour you will see will certainly be slightly different.Even our standard coloured paints are only mixed when an order is received, so there will always be a delay of a few days. Our supply of oils are also a bit erratic, which can slow us down too. And my life is quite erratic, which always slows me down.
Bespoke colours. Theoretically most colours are possible, except white. Because of the yellowness of linseed oil, the whitest white is cream coloured. In practice, light colours are the hardest to match, dark colours are easier. To order a bespoke colour, send a sample of the colour you want or email the name of its equivalent by big paint companies, such as Dulux of Farrow & Ball. In theory, we will send you a hand-painted sample to let you see the colour we propose. You could return this and suggest it be darker, lighter, more yellow, etc, and the process would be repeated. I say "theoretically" because this is a lot of unpaid work.
Ordering
To order, please email us or phone (07985 046827) for a chat. We accept cash, cheque made payable to "Linseed Paint Company" (post it to us at 28 Riverside Road, Glasgow G43 2EF), and credit card payments but aren't so computer friendly that we have computerised ordering systems.Postage and packing
Whatever it costs us, usually between £7.50 and £15.00.Using our (non-shellac) products
Shaken or stirred, it doesn't matter, but mix it up. The pigments sink to the bottom. Once opened the linseed paint will form a skin over the top rather readily (by readily, I mean overnight) if there is plenty of air above it in the container. An old trick is to store the tin upside down, the film thus forms on the bottom. But don't count on this working. Since the paint has to be stirred or shaken violently, the skin will almost always break and the small fragments will make an awful mess of the paint. It is a far better idea to decant the entire remains of the unused paint into a fresh container which just holds it and no more and seal well.Paint with a brush.
A supercheap B&Q genuine bristle brush is all I have used for years (although my rejection of the modern world sometimes collapses and I use good synthetic bristles brushes). To the left are two such brushes (and a honey jar) that I have used for years, although for shellac not paint. Interestingly, after years of use the bristles have taken on the slightly conical shape of new shellac brushes. I only include this photo to show that a 50p brush can be used fifty times. No special technique is required, but brush out the paint thinly. If applied too thickly, the surface of the drying film can wrinkle. The paint and varnish tends to self level and thus scarcely leaves brush strokes. Clean spills and brush with turpentine or citrus oil (or white spirits if you absolutely must). Two coats will certainly be required to seal and protect a wooden surface. A pre-treatment oil is recommended in preference to a conventional primer. In the case of very light colours, two coats will certainly be required to obliterate the old surface colouring. We suggest a third for white and off whites, for they are not terribly opaque, or pigment should be added to the pre-treatment coat to make a whitewash. The paint seems to be attractive to small flying insects, who believe it to be edible. It is thus best applied when warm and sunny and in thin coats to facilitate quick drying.