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Hello All,

I've been getting back into the hobby side of 40k over the past year after a 10 year ish break, and everything has changed as you'd expect. My lovely girlfreind was nice enough to buy me the GW paint set for christmas, but as many of you know the new GW pots are extremely efficient at wasting paint. Also the Cardboard box is too weak to hold the amount of weight it has to carry. So i've decided to make the shift to dropper bottles, but i'm not sure how to go about it. I've sourced some cheap droppers but i need a method of transfer with minimum wastage if possible. Also i've been trying to find a cheap uk based paint rack to replace the horrible GW one.

Anyone have any experience with this?

There was some discussion on this a couple days ago in this thread. A quick youtube search found this, might be helpful. Should be some guides around since it's a common request, a lot of us really don't like them.

His blog was linked in the description, has the full article. Welcome back to the hobby ; )

The link that yonan gives looks pretty good. I use the same ebay dropper bottles, (from Hong Kong I think) but I use them for craft paint, so it's more about having more paint bottles in a small space than wastage.

There's probably no way to completely avoid wastage, but droppers are so much more efficient than pots that you're still likely to get more use out of the paint.

Here's the ebay deal that I purchased. 100 .5oz (15ml) bottles for 35 bucks shipped!
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lot-100-5-OZ-15-ML-HQ-Dropper-Bottles-Plastic-New-LDPE-/260746588653?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3cb5b531ed#ht_1687wt_699

And my article on making a case for the bottles.
http://chicagoskirmish.blogspot.com/2012/09/do-it-yourself-paint-cases-and-dropper.html

I bought some empty vallejo bottles which look similar which worked well for transferring my tamiya paints into. Definitely agreed on less wastage once they're in the bottles. Better all 'round.

Not sure what the best source in Europe is, but I just went through this process with 100+ citadel paints ranging from new line to like 5-6 generations of paint pot ago.

With older paints, in many cases it was necessary to strain the paint before it went into the droppers. With age and use many of my citadel paints had some cured paint clumps that had fallen into the pot. So the best method I found to get as much of the usable paint transferred as possible goes like this:
1. Thin down any pots that are overly thick - they won't transfer well if not
2. Set up your empty bottle with some kind of support
3. insert a small tipped funnel into the bottle - mine is silicone... tends to create an air-tight seal between the outside of the funnel and the empty bottle.
4. place a screen of some kind in the funnel (I used half of a tea ball, the mesh was nice and fine)
5. lift the screen with one hand and the paint with the other and pour the paint through the screen and let it fall into the funnel - I did this so that the paint wouldn't create an air seal by itself before draining down the funnel.
6. With all of the paint from the pot in the funnel (sometimes it creates an air-tight seal on it's own anyway) you may need to lift the funnel a bit to relieve the air seal, thus allowing all of the paint to drain through the funnel.
7. Transfer the label from the GW pot to the dropper bottle. The last two iterations of GW paint have the clear plastic decal labels, but if your stuff was like mine you'll have a lot of old paper sticker labels that don't come off well. Those you'll just have to write a label with a sharpie or something. I got lucky and made a trade not too long ago and a guy was unloading all of his paint (all in the last 2 generations), so I usually had at least 1 pot of each color with the clear plastic decal labels. But I still have Coat d'Arms era citadel paint that I had to write labels on.

Hope it helps, I use these 15ml natural bottles, but it's a US company, so the shipping would probably be prohibitive. I bought 100 for ~$42 total.

Thanks for your answers guys. All very helpful, i managed to source a cheap dropper bottle supplier based in the uk, and have a teeny tiny funnel on order too.

I assume that thinning paints to make them easier to transfer to the new droppers wont have any adverse effects on them?

I know you've ordered stuff now, but just to add my experience, I found using a syringe much easier than a funnel, because funnels easily become blocked with thicker more heavily pigmented paints. I use 10ML plastipak ones, standard NHS issue, but that's because I can get them from work

 Muzzah wrote:
I assume that thinning paints to make them easier to transfer to the new droppers wont have any adverse effects on them?

So long as you don't thin them beyond usefulness, wouldn't be too keen on trying to un-thin them.

To thin them, get actual paint "medium" - not water.

its cheap, and will be worth the minor cost in the long run.

http://www.liquitex.com/FluidMediums/

Best of luck sir!

If you use water when thining, be sure its distilled water, tap water (or most other) contains impurities that may discolour the paint after some time, or even better bacteria that may grow into something yummy after a while (think stagnant water). Also use flow aid with the water, it will reduce the amount of water actually required, also drying retarder can be very useful to extend working time of paints (be careful though; ive not managed it yet but I've heard lots of times about paint being extended to the point of never drying, I find that it gives me an extra 20 minutes or so on my pallete depending how much paint being mixed up. Having a bottle of flow aid/retarder/water mixes up that i use for general brush work thinning, often i put a drop of matte medium a drop of my water/flow aid/retarder mix and a drop of paint.

As davethepak has suggested liquitex fluid mediums are a godsend, and you should really already own them. Alas I would still not thin them at all until you're actually going to use them. You can't decide at this point if you want to use matte, gloss, glaze, ultra matte, or airbrushing mediums. they all do something different and you may later find you've made transparent paint with matte medium, when you wanted opaque paint with ultra matte, or even a glaze etc... by having one thing already mixed in, you compromise the range of effects the other mediums can give you.

Common sense says to do nothing to it until it comes to the time you want to apply it, at which point mix some medium of choice with paint of choice in a pallete and go.

Mediums in dropper bottles could be rather handy though (thats actually what i do with my mediums, I frequently use all of them, but matte medium and ultra matte medium perhaps the most often.

Ok, Thanks for all your help guys. This forum really is a godsend. I already use the GW medium to thin down my paints, purely because it was in the set i was given, i'll do some more research into mediums before i add anything for the transfer. I actually have a small syringe from when the little ones were to little for a spoon so thats an idea.

Thanks again all.

Syringe will work very well for the transfer, you might want to get a small spatula too for getting the paint that sticks around the edges of the old pot
For some reason a Mc Donalds coffee stirer comes to mind