Distemper paint

Paint doesn't come any more natural, practical or traditional than distemper, a beautiful interior finish for walls and ceilings. The term distemper is actually a general term for any water based paint that blends whiting (or chalk) with a weak animal based sizing, or binder, like rabbit skin glue.

A popular feature of Elizabeth Farm is the range and quality of beautiful paints on display throughout the old homestead. These include traditional and modern oil paints, kalsomines, claire colle coatings, curiously concocted drabs, french polishes, interior and exterior limewashes and ultra-flat water-based acrylics. None are more interesting than distemper.

Before the days of mass produced emulsion paints, distemper was incredibly common. It was cheap, practical and easy to make. Not only that, it 'covered well' and was beautful to work with. In colonial homes, distemper was used in servants rooms and informal spaces like the back halls, pantries and stairways along with bedrooms, dressing rooms, conservatories and other private areas. And these are the rooms at Elizabeth Farm where you'll find distemper today.

Here's a brief look at this fascinating paint and a step-by-step guide to making it yourself.

What is distemper?

Distemper is a traditional hand-made paint, that leaves a soft, velvetly, slightly uneven finish. Most of the time distemper can be applied in two coats, one straight after the other. When prepared properly, it goes on easily, dries quickly and can be washed off again with a wet rag. This makes it perfect for painting decorative plasterwork like cornices and ceiling roses where you don't want a build up of paint layers to bury the sculptural detail.

Unfortunately, distempered walls scuff and scratch easily and are difficult to keep clean. Spot cleaning will leave smears and streaks, although in the past distempers were used in low key and utilitarian areas where appearance was unimportant.

Distemper is a perfect finish in buildings where moisture is a problem. Its porosity, or in other words, its ability to breathe, allows underlying moisture to escape to the surface and away from the masonry. It's also the only paint that will sit happily on freshly plastered walls. Oil paint, by contrast, reacts dramatically with the high lime content of traditional plaster, causing the paint to go gluggy and 'saponify', which results in a soapy mess. To avoid this, new walls were left to cure for two to three years, or buffed to a smooth polish. Otherwise the surfaces were finished in distemper until the lime had settled down.

What's it made of?

The main ingredient in distemper is whiting. This is a fine white 'chalky' powder dissolved with water into a creamy paste. You can buy whiting at a hardware shop.The 'binding' ingredient is animal skin glue, or size, which is sold in granules at art supply shops. The glue mixture is prepared separately by adding water, allowing it to absorb and then heating it gently until it becomes a liquid. The job of the glue is to hold the whiting together and help it stick. Once they are ready, the whiting and glue mixtures are stirred together into a creamy liquid. To colour the paint, pigments or ‘tinters’ are carefully added until the desired tone is achieved. Traditional distemper needs to be used quickly as the animal-based parts of the recipe will soon go rancid and smelly if left unused.

Distemper, step by step

At Elizabeth Farm, the back hall, butler's pantry and plant rooms have recently been painted in a soft bluish-grey distemper, with the ceilings finished off in a plain white distemper. Our expert painters Steve Wilson and Archie Smith made the distemper themselves and carefully matched it to coloured fragments rescued from behind the timber architraves and under the floorboards.

They used a simple, traditional distemper recipe, which closely resembles one found in the 1879 tradesmens handbook The paper hanger, painter, grainer, and decorator¹, held in the Caroline Simpson Library.

Here's Steve Wilson's version of the recipe, plus a handy step-by-step visual guide to preparing the ingredients and painting with distemper. We hope you enjoy using this fascinating finish.

Traditional distemper ingredients:

• whiting - 1000 grams
• water - 400 mils
• animal skin glue - 50 grams

Method

1. mix whiting and water, set aside
2. follow directions on the pack to prepare glue
3. heat glue to soupy consistency
4. combine whiting and glue
5. colour with tints
6. filter through fine muslin
7. apply distemper to wall or ceiling
8. stand back and admire

ABC of paint

All paints, (ancient and modern) combine three things: a hiding pigment (whiting, white lead, slaked lime), a binder (hide glue, gum arabic, milk, egg, etc) and a vehicle (mineral turps, water, milk). The hiding pigment gives the paint body and is usually mixed with colouring additives like pigments and chemical tinters. The binder holds the solution together and makes it stick to a surface and the vehicle makes it spread evenly and consistently off the brush.