A series of paint resins of known composition have been analysed by pyrolysis mass spectrometry, pyrolysis gas chromatography and infra-red spectroscopy. The results show that although all three techniques are able to identify many of the resins used in paints, the information given by the techniques is to a certain extent complementary and there are good arguments for employing more than one technique whenever possible. The implications of this work for the analysis of questioned paint samples is discusse.