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Right, so I returned to the hobby after about 6-7 years of hiatus, and found that most of my GW paints have gone to paint heaven (or hell, depending on your perspective). In contrast, none of my Vallejo paints have even dried a little bit. So, one of my projects have been to transfer Citadel paints to Vallejo-style dropper bottles.

I read a bunch and watched tutorials about how to do it--mainly use gravity and a mini funnel, then dilute what's left in the Citadel bottle to get most of the paint out. That seems fine and reasonable, but I didn't quite think it'd work well with GW's texture paints, given how thick they are, and how that consistency is desired for the application of those paints. So, I decided to use a syringe to do it.

I bought a pack of 25 syringes with blunt point needles from Amazon for $10, the sizes ranging from 1ml to 20ml.



The empty bottle is a 30ml LDPE bottle with dropper tip and cap from 510 Central. They sell via Amazon and on their website, and I find their products to be superior to the "generic" brands, some of which have burst apart and leaked.

The first paint I tried was Agrellan Earth. Nice and thick!



... and the syringe (20ml) with the blunt tip.



It took quite a bit of force to pull the plunger back, due to the thick viscosity of the texture paint, and often it'd suck up air cuz the paint in the bottle wasn't settling down fast enough to provide consistent drawing.





Here are the bottles afterwards:



I dropped a couple of hematite beads in the new bottle to help with future agitation.



I wanted to see how much paint was still left in the original bottle. So I weighed an empty shade bottle: Almost 11g.



Then I weighed the original Agrellan Earth bottle. 21g - so almost 10g/10ml of paint was still left in the original bottle. For texture paints, I didn't think this could be helped, as thinning the paint to transfer more would dilute the effect we want from texture paints.



The new bottle weighed in at 25g/25ml, so it now contained about 14ml of Agrellan Earth paint.



By comparison, a fully transferred shade bottle weighed 32g. Given that 11g of that is the actual plastic bottle, that means 21g/21ml (1 gram = 1 milliliter) out of the ostensibly 24ml original shade got transferred.



.. and here we are at the end:



Despite the amount that didn't get transferred, I'm actually OK with the results. I figure I can paint off the original Citadel bottle, without worrying about the bulk of it drying it out due to the design of the Citadel bottles. Also, the other, not-texture paints, will be easier to transfer. And yes, going to use and reuse the "disposable" syringe and the needle after thoroughly washing them!

Hope someone finds this method useful. A lot more control over the gravity/funnel method (which would be impractical with the texture paints), and less waste than using pipettes due to the plunger seal.

1g = 1ml works for water. Paint is going to be a different density.

Do you worry about the hematite beads falling into the dropper-spout and preventing you from squeezing out paint? I guess when you only get a few drops at a time it probably doesn't matter?

Coh Magnussen wrote:
Do you worry about the hematite beads falling into the dropper-spout and preventing you from squeezing out paint? I guess when you only get a few drops at a time it probably doesn't matter?

Not really, but I guess I'll find out soon! The beads are not perfectly spherical, and obviously there's a hole through them. And it wouldn't be too hard to poke it down the spout with a straightened paper clip or something.

Very cool, thanks for sharing.

Thank you for sharing, it looks a great method for transferring the paint over.

If only GW would take note and start using dropper bottles!

Could just save time and money by looking at INSTAR paint, GW shades in dropper bottles at a fraction of the price with worldwide delivery.