Paint Business

Paint is any liquid, liquifiable, or mastic composition which after application to a substrate in a thin layer is converted to an opaque solid film. Paint is used to protect, preserve, decorate (such as adding color), or add functionality to an object or surface by covering it with a pigmented coating. Examples of protection are the covering of metal to retard corrosion, and the painting of a house to help protect it from the elements. Pigments are granular solids incorporated into the paint to contribute color, toughness or simply to reduce the cost of the paint. Alternatively, some paints contain dyes instead of or in combination with pigments.

The binder, commonly referred to as the vehicle, is the actual film forming component of paint. It is the only component that must be present; other components listed below are included optionally, depending on the desired properties of the cured film. The binder imparts adhesion, binds the pigments together, and strongly influences such properties as gloss potential, exterior durability, flexibility, and toughness. Binders include synthetic or natural resins such as acrylics, polyurethanes, polyesters, melamine resins, epoxy, or oils. Binders can be categorized according to drying, or curing mechanism. The four most common are simple solvent evaporation, oxidative crosslinking, catalyzed polymerization, and coalescence. Various technologies exist for making paints that change color. Thermochromic paints and coatings contain materials that change conformation when heat is applied, and so they change color.

Liquid crystals have been used in such paints, such as in the thermometer strips and tapes used in fishtanks. Photochromic paints and coatings contain dyes that change conformation when the film is exposed to UV light, and so they change color. These materials are used to make eyeglasses. Electrochromic paints change color in response to an applied electric current. The electromagnetic field would be formed using the conductive metal of the car body. Electrochromic paints can be applied to plastic substrates as well, using a different coating chemistry. The technology involves using special dyes that change conformation when an electric current is applied across the film itself. Recently, this new technology has been used to achieve glare protection at the touch of a button in passenger airplane windows.

Paint also has a few hidden functions not mentioned in the help file a stamp mode, trail mode, regular shapes, moving pictures, and a strange brush. This, instead of cutting the piece out, creates a copy of it. The process can be repeated as many times as desired, as long as the control key is held down. The trail mode works exactly the same, but it uses the shift key instead of the control key. Paint is nonetheless able to correctly load and save indexed palettes in any of the supported formats if an image is opened as an 8-bit or otherwise indexed palette image. In that case, the image's palette will be preserved when saving. However, there is no way to see the actual palette, and color choices for brushes, text and erasers as well as user-defined colors will be limited to the closest available color in the indexed palette.