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Colormaker Floors
by David Thompson
formulation that Jones has updated with modern admixtures, Pentimento produces a marbleized, highly polished finish. It goes on about 1/8-inch thick and can take multiple re-trowelings, with each pass giving the surface an increasingly polished appearance. One or more layer of Pentimento Finish can later be applied to enhance depth and color.
 Jones regularly organizes seminars and workshops on Pentimento and its color possibilities, but the best training happens at a job sites, he says. “We have an agreement with some of our installers where we can bring somebody on and teach them,” he says. “You get two or three jobs under your belt, and you get so much more confidence than just seeing it go down at a seminar.”
For highlighted trowel textured concrete floors, Colormaker produces Sgraffino, which goes on paper-thin and has a grainy consistency. Trowels tend to skip over the surface, creating a chattered finish with subtle color variations.
The company’s newest topping is called Rotofino, which gives a polished finish but requires less skill to use than Pentimento. For polished concrete floors suitable for stamping, Colormaker offers Pasto, which goes on thicker than Pentimento.
All of these overlays come in gray or white, and all can be integrally colored, stained, dyed or any combination thereof.
 Colormaker’s coloration supplies include:
• Colorfast, a blend of iron oxide pigments and rapid dispersing agents that installers mix on site for integral color. Primary colors can be blended and load levels altered to produce thousands of different colors.
• Patina Etch, an acid stain that reacts with free lime in the cement to highlight irregularities. It creates variegated earth tones, similar to the patina of bronze or the oxidation of copper.
• Deco Graphic Dyes, solvent-based penetrating colors that are sharp and translucent, are suitable for overlays or existing concrete.
• Someru Dye, a water-based dye for a pastel watercolor look. It works well when layers of color are desired.
 The company is currently developing a line of colors made with all-natural pigments, which allow for more variance within a color and a more natural look, Jones says. “Think of the age-old colors of Europe, in Italy and countries like that, where they use natural pigments mined from the earth as opposed to manufactured iron oxides,” he says. “We’ve started pushing down that road.”
The company has also started to push beyond North America, with Colormaker toppings now available in Japan and in Jones’ native Australia.
It was in Australia that Jones started working with concrete toppings, back in 1972. “We’d mix three shovelfuls of pebbles to one shovelful of cement, lay it down about a half-inch thick, then wash it off to expose the aggregate for exterior decks,” he says. From there he moved to installing slate tiles.
In 1989, he married a Canadian and moved to Vancouver, where he opened a slate business. On the side he did stamped concrete, but the demand for concrete soon outpaced the demand for slate, and he shifted to concrete entirely in 1992.
 Before long British Columbia’s rain encouraged another shift. “I thought ‘how can you run a business by the weather?’” Jones says. “So in ’93-’94 we started pushing more into the interior market, and by ’95 we were solely doing interiors and just dropped doing stamped concrete altogether, although we still have the product range.”
Jones and Miller have been working on each other’s jobs since the early 90s, when Jones saw Miller’s work at a World of Concrete show and hired him to develop a stain formulation. Miller was impressed by the pioneering work Jones was doing with overlays.
“He was doing overlays back before people were doing overlays,” says Miller. “And they were overlays that actually worked. They didn’t crack up and they didn’t delaminate and so forth.”
At the time Jones’ overlay formulas were similar to the thinset formulas used to set slate, Miller says. “Where it was new technology for architectural concrete, it was old technology for stone,” he says.
Like Miller, Jones embraces a freeform approach to decorative concrete, though he dislikes that term and prefers to call it “tactile and sensory concrete.” He looks at a floor as a starting point in much the same way a painter looks at a canvas. He likes the hand-crafted look, and would rather not spend a lot of time cutting grids, bands, borders and whatnot.
“We’re actually using the floor as a piece of artwork,” Jones says. “It seems destructive to cut up the Mona Lisa into squares. You leave her alone.”
For more information you can visit the Colormaker Floors Web site.
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