Drawdown of Paint.
Photo Courtesy of BYK-Gardner.

Opacity is an important property of architectural paint. One coat hiding reduces labor costs of a paint job and is a competitive edge in promoting paints to professionals.

Color Consistant Drawdown Charts

During the production of paint bases, the opacity is checked by drawing down a slightly translucent wet paint film on a draw down chart. The color of the substrate (in this case the Y-value of the white and black areas of the draw down chart) needs to remain constant when comparing the original draw down chart to a new box charts for accurate measuring.

If there is a difference between the white and black from chart to chart, a paint batch will show better or worse opacity and inaccurate readings. When considering the volume size of a typical paint batch, an error in the opacity measurement can be a very expensive mistake.

To learn more about this topic, read this article, “No longer erroneous rejects due to port quality test charts,” click HERE.

How to do a drawdown