Starting in May, we're using new Gare Fun Stroke paints:
Why we switched to Gare Paints
After using Mayco’s Stroke & Coat paints for over 15 years, we have switched to Gare Fun Stroke Paint. It’s a change we've been thinking of making, but because of our deep commitment to buying and supporting local, we have delayed this decision until our local vendor retired.
Switching paints is never easy. We have to test the paints in so many ways and ask a lot of questions:
- How do pencil marks react to the paint?
- Will light colors really go over on dark colors well?
- Will brush strokes leave its mark on the bisque?
- Will the lighter purples still turn milky when applied too thick? (Yes, they all do).
- How does the clear glaze react?
There are more questions than the ones I outlined here, but believe me, we worked for many months figuring out and testing whether this switch will be better. There’s also a lot of training involved with using a new clear glaze. But for the most part, from the customer’s perspective, everything should be the same, if not very similar. One thing you’ll notice, we hope, is that the paint applies a lot more smoothly onto your pieces.
Though painting is never a perfect art, and inadvertent results will continue to happen (like black paint turning midnight blue on some pieces for no apparent good reason with Mayco Stroke & Coat), we felt that after our testing, Gare Fun Strokes paints produced more vibrant colors and the paints were easier to work with overall. I haven’t seen a bisque shine like it does now with Fun Strokes since we switched to no-lead based clear glaze (eons ago – over ten years, if memory serves right). And because we carry quite the selection of Gare bisque products, we hope to lessen instances of shivering (this is when the paint just pops off the bisque), as we've seen an increase of this happening in the last year across several vendor products.
We believe you’ll enjoy them too. We don’t pretend to know all the issues that switching paints will present to us, but we hope that we've minimized them through careful planning and testing. Please come in – try it out!
