last year....
David Weaver
i ran into a situation where my wife wanted cherry to be brown instead of cherry. Upon reading about lightfast stains, I found the same thing bill does (and there was some discussion on the HT side that's not necessary to look for other than to say that the venture was a huge success compared to trying to use canned stains, and it's earth pigments so it's lightfast forever from any practical purposes).
I don't know if the artist color matters, but you can get micronized pigments from kremer pigment also and mix them.
I found the ronin colors (probably true for all distillate or oil based pigments that the MSDS shows as being hydrocarbon based) to mix easily into a minwax light stain or a "pre-conditioner" which is just by smell (probably by MSDS) to be similar to the solvent in the stains. I mixed the artist pigment at about 30%, which was pretty strong.
The micronized pigments see highly sanded surfaces as very porous (Because they're still tiny compared to something like a 400 or 600 grit surface), so the wide flat surfaces take on the stain evenly vs. the actual canned stain, which settles only into grain, etc, efficiently.
The artist pigment type doesn't penetrate that deeply, either, it's thicker, so you can wipe it on sparingly and then take a clean rag and rub off any excess pigment on the surface.
It colored as evenly on a hand plane cherry flatsawn surface as it did on a sanded surface, which was a shock.
I'll never stain any other way - prior to that, already used bill's "rubber" method of applying stain rather than soaking and wiping off excess, but that was to avoid the can stains from drenching grains while leaving top surfaces far less stained.
Artist pigments seem expensive, but one quart of concoction would do three large projects. It may be less cost in the long run, before even considering that it's easy to nail application and you'll be trialing mixing pigments in little bits rather than buying "test cans" of stain at $4 or $8 or whatever they decide to charge for them.
