40 Fun Facts About Paint

Which pigment loved by Pre-Raphaelite painters was made from the ground-up flesh of ancient corpses?

Mummy brown was ground from real mummies, human and feline, mixed with pitch and myrrh. Edward Burne-Jones is said to have buried his tube in the garden on learning what it was.

Which Ford car was sold only in black from 1914 to 1925, yet was not offered in black at first?

The Model T came only in gray, green, blue and red from 1908 to 1913. Ford then went all-black, and carbon black was one of the cheapest pigments available.

Which vehicles got a standard yellow in 1939 because black lettering on it reads well in dim light?

School buses got their yellow at a 1939 conference organized by professor Frank Cyr, who became known as the Father of the Yellow School Bus. The shade was also picked because it stands out at a distance.

Which element in glowing dial paint poisoned 1920s workers who licked their brushes to a point?

Radium was the glow in a paint sold as Undark, and the dial painters were told it was harmless. Managers had them use their lips because rags and rinsing wasted time and material.

Which Mark Twain character tricks other children into paying to whitewash his aunt's fence for him?

Tom Sawyer is handed the chore by Aunt Polly as punishment for sneaking home late after a fight. He makes the job look so enjoyable that the others hand over trinkets for a turn.

Which landmark is painted International Orange, not the black and yellow stripes the US Navy wanted?

The Golden Gate Bridge owes its color to architect Irving Morrow, who chose it to suit the landscape and show up in fog. Officially the shade is an orange vermilion.

Which host of The Joy of Painting kept his famous perm only because it was on the company logo?

Bob Ross first permed his hair to save money on haircuts, and later confessed that he disliked the style. He picked up his quick wet-on-wet method from a German painter's TV show.

Which insect is crushed to make carmine, a red pigment used in paints, cosmetics and food coloring?

Cochineal insects were prized for their red coloring power as early as 700 BC. The Spanish Crown held a European monopoly on them until 1820, and they were a major source of its income.

NASA stopped painting which Space Shuttle part white after two flights, saving about 600 pounds?

The external tank flew white on the first two missions to shield its foam from ultraviolet light. An engineer pointed out the paint did not protect it, so later ones kept their bare insulation.

The first paintball guns were built for foresters and ranchers to do which job?

Marking trees and cattle was the job of the guns a friend spotted in a farm catalog. A stock trader and an outdoorsman used them in New Hampshire in 1981 to settle an argument.

Which toxic metal has been banned from household paint in the United States since 1978?

Lead stayed legal in some road-marking and artists' paints after the 1978 ban. Britain went on selling it to the general public until 1992.

Which blue pigment, at times valued as highly as gold, was ground from the stone lapis lazuli?

Ultramarine means 'beyond the sea', because Italian traders imported it from mines in Afghanistan. Renaissance painters used it especially for the robes of the Virgin Mary.

Before oil paint replaced it, tempera painters usually bound their pigments with which food?

Egg yolk gives tempera a fast-drying, permanent finish. Oil took over as the main medium in northern Europe during the 15th century, and in Italy around 1500.

Which hardware-store staple did Edward Seymour invent in 1949 to show off his aluminum radiator coating?

Spray paint came about when Seymour's wife Bonnie suggested putting his coating into the kind of pressurized can already on sale. It was only meant as a way to demonstrate the product.

Which landmark is painted in three shades, darkest at the bottom, and recoated every seven years?

The Eiffel Tower takes about 60 tons of paint each time, to keep its iron from corroding. The shades lighten toward the top to complement the Paris sky.

Which farm buildings in the northern United States are traditionally painted red with a white trim?

Barns may have gone red because ferric oxide, the pigment in red paint, was the cheapest and most readily available chemical for New England farmers.

Which shaggy breed is nicknamed the Dulux dog after decades as a British paint brand's mascot?

The Old English Sheepdog has fronted Dulux advertising since the early 1960s. Different dogs have played the part over the years.

Which Indian instrument does Brian Jones play on the Rolling Stones' 1966 hit Paint It Black?

The sitar made Paint It Black the first chart-topping single to feature the instrument. The song grew out of melodies that Jones improvised on it.

Which American artist dripped and poured household paint onto canvases laid flat on the floor?

Jackson Pollock made his most famous drip paintings between 1947 and 1950. Working on a horizontal surface let him view and paint a canvas from all angles.

Which poison made Scheele's green, a pigment in Victorian wallpaper and paint, so dangerous?

Arsenic in Scheele's green also colored candles and children's toys. Journals of the day told of children wasting away in bright green rooms.

Which Western star did his own singing beside Lee Marvin in the 1969 musical Paint Your Wagon?

Clint Eastwood sang for himself in the film, while co-star Jean Seberg had her songs dubbed. Marvin took his role instead of appearing in The Wild Bunch.

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, card gardeners paint white roses red to appease which ruler?

The Queen of Hearts is often confused with the Red Queen, a different character from Lewis Carroll's 1871 sequel. Disney's 1951 animated film kept the mix-up going.

In The Karate Kid, which mentor has Daniel wax cars and paint a fence as hidden training?

Mr. Miyagi has Daniel paint the fence with vertical strokes and the house with horizontal ones. The repeated motions turn out to be defensive blocks, learned through muscle memory.

Linseed oil, the classic binder in oil paint and a key part of linoleum, comes from which plant?

Flax seeds are dried and pressed for the oil, whose polymer-forming properties make it harden as it dries. In its edible form the same oil is sold as flaxseed oil.

Which product did 3M's Richard Drew create in 1925 after watching frustrated car painters at work?

Masking tape solved a problem Drew saw in auto body shops, where workers grew frustrated removing the butcher paper they had stuck to cars. He realized they needed a gentler adhesive.

The collapsible paint tube of 1841 made outdoor painting far easier for which French art movement?

Impressionism leaned on open-air work, and Monet, Pissarro, Sisley and Renoir did much of their painting outdoors. The tube was invented by an American portraitist, John G. Rand.

The pigment sepia came from the ink sac of which sea animal, whose Greek name it borrows?

Cuttlefish of the genus Sepia gave the pigment both its raw material and its name. The word is the Latinized form of the ancient Greek for the animal.

In which James Bond film is Jill Masterson found dead, her whole body coated in metallic paint?

Goldfinger has Bond wake after being knocked out to find her dead of what the film calls skin suffocation. Shirley Eaton played the part.

The Painted Desert, named by a Spanish expedition in 1540 for its colors, lies in which US state?

Arizona's Painted Desert runs from near the Grand Canyon into Petrified Forest National Park. Iron and manganese compounds in the rock layers supply its reds and lavenders.

Which compound, mass-produced since 1916, is the most widely used white pigment in paint?

Titanium dioxide owes its brightness to a very high refractive index. It also turns up in sunscreen, food coloring and most toothpastes.

Indian yellow pigment was said to come from the urine of which animals fed only on mango leaves?

Cows kept on that diet were poorly nourished, and their sparse urine was collected, concentrated over a fire and dried into foul-smelling balls called purree.

Which acacia sap, also found in soft drinks and marshmallows, traditionally binds watercolor paint?

Gum arabic dissolves in water and is edible, with the properties of both a glue and a binder. It also holds together the powders packed into fireworks.

Turpentine, long used to thin oil paint, is distilled from the resin of which living trees?

Pine resin was the classic source, but turpentine later became mostly a byproduct of pulping wood. Decorators know it by the short name turps.

What is dropped onto wet road-marking paint so that lane lines reflect headlights back at night?

Glass beads make the lines retroreflective, sending light straight back toward its source. Crews are advised to fire them from a separate gun onto the paint while it is wet.

Which sculptor of Chicago's Bean was granted exclusive artistic rights to the coating Vantablack?

Anish Kapoor's license came from the maker, Surrey NanoSystems, and covers a paint built from randomly aligned carbon nanotubes. It absorbs light from ultraviolet right through to terahertz waves.

Which World War I paint scheme used clashing shapes to disguise a ship's speed and heading?

Dazzle camouflage was never meant to conceal a ship, only to make its range and course hard to judge. It is credited to the British marine artist Norman Wilkinson.

Which paint brand did a sea captain found in 1921 after seeing what spilled fish oil did to his decks?

Rust-Oleum's founder, Robert Fergusson, had noticed that the oil kept corrosion from spreading across the rusty metal decks of his ship.

Which Indian city was painted pink in 1876 to welcome the visiting Prince of Wales?

Jaipur got its color under the ruler Sawai Ram Singh II, for a visit by the future Edward VII. Many of its avenues stayed that way, which earned it the name Pink City.

Which ancient civilization made the first synthetic pigment, a blue cooked up from sand and copper?

Egypt used the pigment for thousands of years but left no written recipe. The Roman author Vitruvius first recorded how the ingredients were ground, shaped into balls and heated in a furnace.

The brilliant scarlet pigment vermilion was historically made from which toxic ore of mercury?

Cinnabar is the most common ore for refining mercury, and its toxicity was recognized as early as ancient Rome. The best-known deposits are at Almadén in Spain.