Homemade House Paint

By Letters From Our Readers
Updated on July 3, 2024
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by Kyle Isacksen
Paint a few swatches to fine-tune your colors and number of coats.

Learn to make homemade house paint with mortar and kaolin clay for a natural and nontoxic substitute for petroleum-based paints.

Clay paints are an Earth-friendly, natural, and nontoxic substitute for petroleum-based paints, and are easy to source, make, and use. We’ve covered the interior walls of our home with clay paints, right over latex-paint-covered drywall. In addition to looking great, clay paints make dead walls feel alive. They attract attention and draw you to run your hand over them in a way oil-based coatings never could. Nowadays, you can even buy ready-to-use clay paints from stores online, but we make our own using a mix of locally harvested and store-bought materials.

It’s fun to use clay-rich soils that you’ve dug up from the ground or gathered near a road cut, but they can be tricky to work with, as they vary in so many ways: Some are powdery and fine and easy to use in paints, while others are compacted, clumpy, and can be “aggressive” in how much they expand and shrink. If you don’t know how to prep them properly, they might turn you off from using them. Start off buying fine clays and pigments online or from your local hardware or pottery store.

Kaolin Clay Paint Recipe

We mostly use mortar clay and sometimes kaolin clay (much more expensive) for clay paints and finish plasters. The mortar clay is a light tan and the kaolin a cool white. Both are fine powders, take pigments well, and make for great natural paints.

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