Click here to learn more best practices that can help you save time – and money – as a professional painter. Drawdown cards can help measure color, spread rate, opacity, bleed, viscosity, thickness, gloss, and a wide number of other physical properties critical to identifying the specific qualities of a particular paint. The actual wet film thickness can vary from 50 to 90 of the gap depending on the gap clearance. Resene DIY cardholders if you purchase 1L of more of the same colour in Resene paint the price of the drawdown can be taken off your paint price.
These are free to Resene professional specifiers, a small charge applies to retail orders. The drawdown process consists of many variables. Resene standard colour drawdowns are available for ordering online. We cannot guarantee that you will draw-down the theoretical wet film thickness. As the name implies, a drawdown card is a piece of firm card stock that features a black portion and a white portion. If you have a gap clearance of 6 mils, the theoretical wet film thickness etched on the bar applicator is 3 mils. But whether it happens once a month or once in your entire career, a preventable error will happen that will ultimately be your responsibility. The simplest way for these manufacturers to test the color, opacity, and gloss of a paint sample begins with a drawdown card. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it is likely that your testing will simply confirm that everything is as it should be.
Is it possible that the paint mixer worked correctly or the color mix was exact? Of course. Just because other painters are working without properly calibrating their tools or testing their materials, that doesn’t mean you should do the same. DRAWDOWN CARDS: Black and white plastic cards supplied by paint stores to provide accurate and consistent color and sheen level of the coatings being used.
Does using a drawdown card take some time? Yes, but not so much that the practice should be outright ignored for the sake of expediency.īest practices in professional painting don’t change just because many professional painters ignore them. Dry Paint Drawdown Cards in only 4.5 minutes Provides rapid color analysis of paints (ASTM D1729) Conventional drying requires 8 hours Extremely accurate and repeatible Application Data. Testing and evaluating things every step of the way is no longer the standard, making it a significant competitive advantage for painters who are detail-oriented enough to recognize that mistakes do happen and preventing them can save the client untold frustration and money. Testing the paint this way means you can be sure of the test results, since you are using your own tools in the test process. Squiggle and draw down the cotton swab on the paper to reveal the undertone of the pigment. Dip the cotton swab lightly at the end of your first drawdown and the pigment will instantly transfer into the swab. Image courtesy of Paint Styleįinally, a large Opacity drawdown card is ideal for testing paint thickness and coverage while using the brush or roller you will actually be utilizing during the paint work. Take a cotton swab and dip it in water until it’s saturated.