Colouring your grout
You take your time coming up with a brilliant design, carefully cut and lay your tiles over a period of hours, days or weeks and feel completely happy with your work to this point – all you’ve got to do is grout it.
Then disaster strikes – you choose the wrong grout colour, a lot of your detail is lost and the entire work looks a mess! There’s virtually nothing you can do about it and all your time and energy has been lost.
This can and does happen, and is always a risk to think carefully about.
In the following pages, I’ll talk about some of the considerations in choosing grout colour and show lots of comparisons to help you avoid these types of costly mistakes.
How to colour grout
There are 3 common methods of colouring your grout:-
1. Buy coloured grout “off the rack”
Major tiling retailers usually will have a reasonable range of different colours, but they are geared more to house & commercial tiling – not mosaic work. They contain cement oxides (explained shortly) and it’s easy to find shades of black, brown, white. You might have to look a bit harder to find other colours. The drawback besides the limited colours is cost – it will be significantly more expensive than making your own.
2. Add acrylic paint pigments to your own grout.
Many other artists advocate the use of acrylic paint pigments added to your grout mix. This seems practical as you could add any premixed colour to white or grey grout to get exactly what you want.
I haven’t tried this method as I’ve been advised that UV rays will eventually break down the colour – making these pigments unsuitable for use outside.
There shouldn’t be any problem for indoor work though & this would be a great option.
3. Using Cement oxides in your own grout mix
This is the method I use & therefore the method I know best.
Cement oxides are widely available at hardware stores, tiling shops & specialist concrete equipment suppliers. They come in a solid range of colours and can be mixed to achieve your own tailor made shades. They are mostly available as a powder, but sometimes in liquid form too. There may be a bit of cost to set up your own range of colours, but the oxides go a long way & work out very cost effective overall.
In my studio, I keep black, terracotta (almost orange), dark brown, red, blue, green & yellow and keep big bags of grout in black and white. That way I can mix up pretty much any colour I like in any shade.
Once mixed thoroughly with your grout, they are colourfast both indoors & out. I suggest keeping a record of the proportions you mix with your grout so you can remake them again later.
To experiment with colour, make a small batch of grout & add the oxide in small amounts – a little bit goes a long way. Also, make sure you’ve mixed it in thoroughly with the grout or it could finish quite “blotchy”
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Cement oxides |
Grout colouring tips
1. Decide your grout colour at the time you create your design
It’s a bad idea to lay your mosaic work & decide which grout colour you’ll use once finished. The grout colour has a major impact on the final look of your work, but also affects each individual colour of tile used throughout your work. It’s much easier to adjust your design and tile colours to your grout than the other way around.
2. Decide how you want your grout to impact on your colours over the whole piece.
In general, dark grouts will enhance your vibrant colours (reds, yellows etc.) & help to blend your deeper colours.
Light grouts will mute your bright colours somewhat, and help blend pastel colours.
Know in advance what effect you’re looking for and use grout colour to your advantage.
3. Look at how your grout colour will impact on each individual tile colour
If your work has a white focal point with lots of detail and intricate laying, it would be a terrible mistake to use white grout. All your detail will be lost.
Similarly, if you were creating bright yellow flowers with a well defined shape, you would lose everything if you were to use a yellow grout.
Give thought to every colour tile you’re using.
4. Think about your grout colour when laying your tiles
If you were to lay white tiles with a black grout, it becomes very important to lay your tiles tight with consistent grout lines. The black grout will highlight any sloppy work.
On the other hand, you can take less care when laying black tiles in black grout as imperfections can’t be detected anyway.
Over the next three pages, I’ll show you practical examples of how grout colour can affect your final work.
