| Oil Colour- In The Making |
 Oil colour starts with the blending of carefully weighed pigments and drying oil, which all undergo rigorous quality checks before they are allowed in the factory, let alone the paint.
Most oil colours are made from refined linseed oil, which comes from flax, but sunflower oil is used for whites, because it's less prone to yellowing.
 Pigments come from a variety of sources, ranging from natural earth pigments to man-made organic pigments.
Once the oil colour has been mixed it looks like a thick paste, but if you looked at it under an electron microscope you would see pieces of pigment of different sizes floating in the oil.
 To release the most brilliant colour, the pigment is ground to a very small and even particle size, using a triple-roll mill which replaced grinding by hand some 150 years ago. Not only does it save time and muscle power, it also gives consistent quality paint of the highest standard.
When triple-roll-mills were introduced they were made of granite, but more modem versions are steel. The mill is made of three cylinders, positioned one behind the other, with a small gap between.
The back and the front cylinders roll in an opposite direction to the middle roller, and at a different speed, crushing the pigment to supermicron fineness. All colours go through the mill at least twice and some up to six times.
 A sample of milled colour is checked by Quality Control against standards going back five years and more to make sure that the tint, consistency, pigment size and density are to specification.
Colour checking is done by eye. Just as a 'nose' in the perfume business is finely trained to smell, so our technicians have a highly trained "eye". No colour can go any where in the factory until it has passed these tests.
Once approved, it is packed into aluminium tubes, which are made to the same standard as those used in pharmaceutical industry. Each is coated inside to ensure that the aluminium cannot react with the colour.
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