Colour milled on a slab in Salt River

Oil paint, dry pigment and unprimed linen, ground and cut on the premises

Three passes on the slab

Pigment and cold-pressed linseed go onto marble and come off it three times, which is what turns wet grit into paint that will hold a brushmark. A batch is four litres and takes a morning. Nothing else goes in — no wax, no aluminium stearate, nothing to make it spread more easily than it ought to.

Cut off the roll, unprimed

Belgian linen comes in by the bolt and leaves by the metre, cut at the counter and rolled on a tube so it arrives without a crease across the middle. We sell it unprimed because most people who buy linen would rather size it themselves. If you never have, come in and we will do half a metre of offcut with you first.

Six in the morning

The mill runs before the shop opens, because the slab is cold then and the paint comes off it stiffer. By half past eight there are forty tubes filled, capped and labelled by hand, and the roller door goes up on Voortrekker Road. Whatever we ground that morning is what is on the shelf that day — which is why the colour list changes week to week, and why we would rather you phoned and asked than guessed.