Researchin'

Cave Paintings - earth tones made from ground minerals, made crude paint sticks/crayons from dirt and animal fat, painted with carving tools, swabs and pads, blow paint through hollowed bones to make subtle airbrush type shading, tools to rind paint down, animal shoulder bones

Ancient China - perfected paint manufacture, created first synthetic pigment  3000 BC, blue frit made form blue grass

Egyptian - invented coloured paints, showed them to the romans, invented the colour egyptian blue

Plato - Discovered that mixing two colours together made a third, well done Plato 400 BC ish

Many people started using oils as varnishes and pigments like red and yellow ochre and greens mixed with binders such as gum Arabic, lime, egg albumen, and beeswax to produce paints.

Middle Ages -  Artists also begin boiling resin to oil to obtain highly mixable paints.

1500 - invented linseed oil which was used as solvent until synthetic brought in 20th century 

1865 Start making a water-based paint that also contains zinc oxide, potassium hydroxide, resin, milk, and linseed oil.

1867: D.R. Averill of Ohio patents “ready-mixed” paint in the United States. Prior to that, “paint” purchasers bought only the type of pigment they required and then blended it at home.

1880: The Sherwin-Williams Company perfects the formula for suspending fine particles of linseed oil, allowing its paint to surpass the quality of all known paints available at the time.

Mid-1880s: Mechanization makes the manufacturing process of paint accessible to a larger and less specialized group of entrepreneurs. Paint factories begin springing up in population and industrial centers across the nation. The weight of prepared paint makes it expensive to transport, so small manufacturers in discrete markets dominate the industry until the mid-1900s.

1940s : New synthetic vehicles are developed from polymers such as polyurethane and styrene-butadene. 

1950s: The paint industry begins using the aerosol can for spray paint.

1963: Pantone develops the first color matching system, commonly referred to as PMS (Pantone Matching System).

TODAY: Synthetic pigments and stabilizers are used to mass-produce uniform batches of paint. Alkyd resins dominate production. Sand mills and high-speed dispersion mixers are used to easily grind dispersible pigments.

Environmental regulators worldwide tighten volatile organic compound (VOC) and hazardous air pollutant (HAP) release standards in the production of paint and coatings.

Demand for radiation-curable coatings (RAD CURE), power-coating, and nanotechnology increases in the search for more environmentally safe, solvent-free and fast-drying paint and coatings.

Rising energy and raw material costs are identified as two of the major concerns impacting Paint & Coatings manufacturers.