Make Your Own Milk Paint

Milk paint, sometimes found on antique furniture, was used by early American pioneers. Making your own for walls is cheap, easy, produces lovely, soft colors, and is environmentally healthy, with no odor and no toxins. Many commercial paints contain a wide variety of potentially harmful chemicals. However, some commercial companies now offer environmentally-friendly or low VOC paints.  Be careful to read the label, though, as some paints that are advertised as “eco” may not be. 

Basically, milk paint consists of milk mixed with hydrated lime, then color added. The lime combines with proteins or casein in the milk to make calcium caseinate, a resin, which carries the color and creates the paint surface. After reviewing several online recipes, I created my own recipe and colored the paint with natural dyes.

Many recipes use powdered pigments, but traditional paints used berries for color. I looked up natural dyes for paint with little success. Dyes in herb books are mostly for fabrics or weaving and use a mordant to fix the color.

My basic recipe was 2-3 cups whole organic milk, 1/3 -1/2 cup hydrated lime (used in gardening), and then whatever dye. I mixed the milk and lime, stirred to get rid of lumps, then let it sit for awhile, about 1 hour, to get thicker. I made dye by steeping some safflower threads (used in cooking- like saffron but cheaper) in hot water, then cooling and stirring the resulting liquid into the paint. For one batch I stirred turmeric powder directly into the paint and colored another batch with temple powder I’d brought back from a trip to India. One recipe suggested that hardwood ash could be used instead of lime, so I made one batch with hardwood ash, the rest with lime.

The paint had absolutely no smell, except the turmeric batch which smelled spicy. The turmeric batch went on yellowy; the safflower batch was deeper yellow-orange. The wood ash batch was muddy in color and gray-brownish, even after I strained it through cheesecloth to remove the more solid pieces; I would not use wood ash again.

Apply the paint with a brush in broad strokes, feathering into each area. Because the paint is very runny, work with it quickly, painting the walls first, before woodwork, and covering floors and woodwork with an old sheet.  Wipe up any drips immediately.  I have used milk paint on old plaster walls, on new drywall that has been primed first, and on previously painted drywall (which just changes the base color), and on old drywall that had been stripped of vinyl-type wallpaper (which left some pieces of base paper on the drywall and I just painted over these).  You can now get primer that has low VOC and is more environmentally friendly.

In daylight, the paint appears somewhat fluorescent, has a soft “tie-dye” quality, and looks beautiful over plaster- giving any gouges and marks on the walls an "old-world" quality, like walls in an old hacienda or villa. Batches dyed with French green clay and red clay powders worked very well, and one tinted with Indian temple powder was a lovely soft pink.  The clays lack the somewhat fluorescent quality of the safflower, turmeric, and temple batches but were a lovely soft grainy color. Powdered beet and willow were dismal, dirty failures.  Experiments with herbs used to dye fabric - anything with "tinctoria" in its name did not work.

Leftover paint keeps several days in the refrigerator or may be disposed of in your garden. Clean-up is with water. There is no smell- no headaches, no toxins. The walls change appearance with the light- in some light the colors look pale and in others dark.

Some recipes suggest using cottage cheese instead of milk for more durable, resistant paint or covering the painted walls with a sealer, such as linseed oil - good to try in a kitchen.

Discovering the recipes, trying them, and living with the results are fun. Often environmentally responsible actions seem to involve going without or not doing something. This is a safe alternative that to my mind is way, way better than the conventional method. The results do not appeal to everyone, of course, as some people want walls that are more evenly colored and without variation.

Milk painted walls create a quiet, peacefulness about interior space. The colors are soothing and poetic: the soft, somewhat powdery look and feel of the green clay, the light pink of the temple powder, and the glow of the turmeric.

Karen Cairns has her doctorate in environmental education, master's degree in public health, and is a retired nurse. She recently moved to Virginia and is a writer, educator, and ashtanga yoga practitioner/teacher.

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