How does paint work and why do colors stick to a canvas?
Paint's Sticky Secret
How does paint work and why do colors stick to a canvas?
Here's a quiet little mystery you've probably never questioned: you smear colored goop across a flat cloth, it dries, and somehow it stays there for five hundred years. Paint doesn't fall off. It doesn't slide away. So what's actually going on inside that stripe of color?
First, let's pull paint apart into its two jobs. Every paint is really a team of two: the color part and the glue part. The color part is called the pigment — tiny solid specks that have a color. On their own, pigments are just colored dust, like the powder inside a stick of chalk. Dust alone won't stick to anything.
