Less harmful indoor graffiti

Standing in the paint smell doesn't have to be unpleasant. For example, Montana Colors adds fragrances to its MTN94 cans. Yellow, for example, smells like banana and red like strawberry. Very tasty, but no less unhealthy. After a long day of painting, you can get quite dizzy. I myself woke up with a bloody nose once when I had painted a children's room the day before.
It was my first real job and I was wearing one of those white dust masks. Afterwards, I learned that those only stop dust and not propellants. Nowadays, I only use a 3M half-face mask. Apart from dust, they also block propellants, which makes a big difference. However, you can still scrape a layer of paint out of your nose and throat at night. Which means something still gets into your lungs....

A month ago, we had an assignment to paint an office. It was a big room and we had opened all the windows wide. We thought that therefore the gases must be fine and threw our roller case full of MTN94 paint. It has low pressure (nice for details), 'tis reliable paint, lots of colours and cheaper than Montana or Belton, hence our preference.

We started paying attention to it, how it was that there was still paint in your nose and throat despite the mask. As the day progressed, we started sweating behind the mask and the strap around our heads started to irritate. On top of this, customers often came to watch and wanted to have a chat. All reasons to take off the mask for a while and sniff the paint.

Graffiti is normally synthetic-based and therefore not very healthy. That does ensure that it works in all weathers and stays on any surface. Perfect for all your outdoor jobs, where gases can spread well.
For indoor work, you're in an enclosed concentrated space, which is why we looked for other (less harmful) paint for that. We started trying acrylic and water-based graffiti. At first we were sceptical, will it stick? Nothing could be further from the truth...

Our search began with Flame Blue. The paint is similar to MTN94 and Montana Gold (low pressure and matt finish) and acrylic-based. We were under the assumption that this would be less toxic. The smell was indeed less intense, but that the paint is acrylic-based just like the synthetic variant is solvent-based. As a result, just as toxic as the synthetic variant.

So that was not such a good experience with acrylic graffiti... So we decided to try MTN Waterbased. In terms of quality, the paint is very good and it doesn't smell at all. Besides, the paint is not solvent-based, but 100% water-based. The only downside is that the paint is relatively more expensive than the 400ml synthetic variants.

MTN Waterbased is perfect for children though as it is small aerosols for small hands and it is totally non-toxic. Another success example, we heard from Egbert. He had a client who wanted him to paint something live at a trade fair and it really shouldn't stink. MTN Waterbased was then also the perfect solution for him!