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It seems pretty obvious, but I don't want to make assumptions. I think I want smallish (15 ml?) dropper bottles, some flow aid (Liquitex?) and an eyedropper.

Obviously this makes access for use much easier... but will it help preserve paints? I live in an extremely arid climate and it ruins my paint on a regular basis. Is there a better way to store them, like upside down or in some sort of humidifier? Also, should I add a mixing ball or a bit of sprue?

Thanks!

don't add the flow aid. it might set the paint (like Tamiya X10 does). You want to match what ever carrier medium your paint manufacturer uses. Eg Lahmiun Medium for GW although that will be quite expensive. Use distilled or deionised water instead.
Re size - I would go for a 20ml size minimum.
I would store them upside down for a better seal & yes, add agitator balls. Nail polish ones are much cheaper than ones aimed at our market but are the same thing. Use 2 per bottle.
Instead of an eye dropper, try looking for a mini funnel. You should be able to get a set of 10 for a couple of bucks. This way you can decant more than one at a time before having to wash out your gear for the next colours.
I'm going through this process myself atm.

If you mean compared to something like GW pots? Yes, any competently designed storage piece (dropper bottle) will keep your paints far longer. GW is almost notorious for gakky designed (and lower volume) paint pots. A cynical mind might even suggest they're intentionally gak designs so paint dries up and goes bad. This has been an issue since they left Coat d'Arms in the late 90's/early 2000's.

Coat d'Arms still uses the same old pots and plenty of people have paints that are still good from the 1990's. GW just makes garbage paint pots.

Agree with the above information on transfers and storage, etc.

 Elbows wrote:
If you mean compared to something like GW pots? Yes, any competently designed storage piece (dropper bottle) will keep your paints far longer. GW is almost notorious for gakky designed (and lower volume) paint pots. A cynical mind might even suggest they're intentionally gak designs so paint dries up and goes bad. This has been an issue since they left Coat d'Arms in the late 90's/early 2000's.

Coat d'Arms still uses the same old pots and plenty of people have paints that are still good from the 1990's. GW just makes garbage paint pots.

Agree with the above information on transfers and storage, etc.

I have pots from the 1980's that are still fine


Automatically Appended Next Post:
plus you can buy Coat D'arms pots:

https://www.blackhat.co.uk/product-category/coat-darms-paints/coat-darms-paints-extras/

You only really want flow improver when you are looking to reduce your surface tension. That won't help keep the paint from drying. Also, I am no an expert, but adding more medium won't (in my estimation) likely help much if the paint is drying out.

I think you want some of this sort of stuff which is specifically made to slow the drying of acrylic paint. Just put a few drops in, maybe with a few drops of water. I've used to before and it definitely helps keep the paint from drying on the pallet, so I'm sure it would work well in the paint bottles/pots.

As for the dropper bottles, I use 20ml ones I get fairly cheap from China, off eBay.

Great, thanks for the input!

I'm going to experiment with the following: Liquitex FlowAid ($8), Liquitex Matte Medium (already on the bench), de-ionized water (TBD), 50 piece 20 ml dropper bottles ($11), 100 piece 1/8" stainless steel agitator balls ($6), a pile of children's medicine syringes (salvaged), and about 20 years worth of old paint in various conditions. The colors I'm trying to rescue are mostly thick/high-pigment base paints that tend to degrade more quickly and more vibrant colored layer paints that I use infrequently (for lenses, purity seals, and detailed accessories like books and sashes). For about $25 in materials I hope to salvage around $200 in old paint and with the same purchase find the right way preserve the $90 I spent today on new paints.

Please keep the comments and advice coming... also your best video how-tos. I've watched the Luke's APS one on making DIY Lahmian Medium, one from 4 Epic Minutes on using FlowAid, and one from Spikey Bits on droppers generally... did I miss an awesome one?

Well, I tried to rescue some old Citadel paints, after about 7 years of not having been touched. Unfortunately, one, I didn't have a clue what I was doing, and two, many of them were way beyond what could be salvaged. In fact, adding too much flow-aid is a quick way to ruin the paint altogether (I did this accidentally to a couple).

What I found was that, if the paint is dry, as in hardened, it is basically done for. No amount of water, retardent (and especially flow aid) can take it from that state.

As a quick point, acrylic paint is "basically" three things (not really, but for the sake of simplicity in this case, we can boil it down to that). You have pigment, the medium and the solvent.

The pigment is just what gives it the color. The medium is the binder that will hold the pigment in place and "bind" that to whatever it is painted onto (and itself). The solvent is what keeps the medium from binding while in the "unused" state. The issue though is that this solvent isn't a "true" solvent, in the sense that it is actively dissolving the bonds, rather it is just inhibiting the binding process.

So, once the medium has began to bind, that is, "dry" or hardened, water cannot undo those bonds. Medium, which is functionally just additional binders, won't do that either.

What could be done is adding a polar solvent that would actually break down the bonded medium. The issue though, is, one, now you have polar solvent all in your paint, two, there isn't an "easy" way to get that out. Polar solvents can be some kind of nasty stuff and likely make your non-dangerous acrylics into something rather more poisonous. I don't recall who, off-hand, but I saw a video a while back about someone putting ammonia into some old, dry, GW paints. It sure worked to get them back to liquid, but now you have a whole bunch of ammonia in your paint. Likely it would ruin any brush you use with it and I have no idea how it would do on a model (since plastic is polar and resin, I don't know, but I'd guess it's polar too).

For complete clarity, I am not a chemist and I am not a paint expert by any stretch of the imagination. I actually can imagine a way to get around all those problems, but in the end, it's likely cheaper and/or easier (probably safer, as well) to just get new paints though if they are full-on dry and hard.

For preservation, I would get the Liquitex fluid retarder that I linked too, aqueous flow-aid likely evaporates faster than just plain water, so it won't help for preservation. Honestly, from a chemical standpoint, adding more medium probably would make the problem of premature drying accelerate, since you are then, in effect, diluting the amount of solvent in the mixture as a whole. Adding water and medium keeps the whole ratio the same and thus likely only serves to dilute the pigment level.

But as I said, I am not a chemist or an expert in anything, except maybe in writing posts that are way too long.

I've revived some pretty gnarly old paints using nothing but water and extensive agitation. I was given a pot of Skull White by a friend who hadn't used it in years - one of the old black-topped hex bottles. The stuff had the consistency of flan. You could more or less cut it by sliding a toothpick through and no amount of shaking would cause it to shift in the pot. Slow additions of water and constant stirring brought it back to the point where I could move to shaking with each addition of water. It ended up in not only a usable state, but one entirely comparable to newer paints I had bought.

After several subsequent years of disuse and a week spent baking in a shipping container sent to South Carolina in the summer (during our move down here), I just checked and found it in the exact same state as before (well, having been jostled around so much, some paint that had splashed up onto the lid dried there, completely). Again, I only plan to use water (after I scrape away the fully dried bits). I'm all for using mediums when I want to change the working properties of a paint, but as for reconstituting thickened (but not dried/cured) paint? Water is all you need. I might add a little flow aid, matte medium, and/or retarder along with the water if I'm making a bottle of an airbrush-ready mix, but not when thinning for preservation's sake - I want the paint to stay close to its original characteristics, so that I have the option of using it for a variety of tasks.

My rudimentary knowledge of the chemical workings of acrylic paint aligns with H's, above. If water acts as a curing inhibitor and controls viscosity, it would follow that it is the only necessary addition to reconstitute a paint that hasn't completely gone off. Everyone has their own favorite recipe, but that's mine and why.


More to the original post: A lot of it depends on the quality of the container. The old GW hex pots sealed quite a bit better than any of the subsequent designs. Even cheap craft paints tend to fare quite well over long-term storage, in comparison to the newer GW pots. Likewise, there are good and less good dropper bottles. By and large, though, droppers will keep paint better, being that A) the narrow neck and nozzle allows for less evaporation, even with a bad seal, and B) they necessitate the use of a palette, which doesn't promote leaving the container open during use. I'm a big fan of agitators, so long as you can find something inert and weighty enough to make a difference.

 oadie wrote:
I've revived some pretty gnarly old paints using nothing but water and extensive agitation. I was given a pot of Skull White by a friend who hadn't used it in years - one of the old black-topped hex bottles. The stuff had the consistency of flan. You could more or less cut it by sliding a toothpick through and no amount of shaking would cause it to shift in the pot. Slow additions of water and constant stirring brought it back to the point where I could move to shaking with each addition of water. It ended up in not only a usable state, but one entirely comparable to newer paints I had bought.

Yeah, that matches what I found too. After having done a bunch and then a bunch more, I realized that if I could push the toothpick (or whatever) through it, there was a really good chance that it could be made "liquid" again. If it was so hard that it couldn't, or it was extremely difficult, it was done. I think your analogy to the consistency of flan is likely apt, in my experience, although it might depend on the paint in question. In other words, the viscosity can be "fixed" and brought from somewhat "congealed" to "flowing" but it can't (without the aid of a polar solvent) be brought from solid to liquid. If the paint won't move in the pot at all, you likely won't be able to fix it with just water or additives short a real solvent.

"Congealed" is a good word for it. If actually solid, as opposed to just being highly viscous, it's done for. Painting from a dry palette makes for a reasonable demonstration, I think. If you have a pool of paint, the tendency is for it to start skinning over, as it dries from the outside, in. Continued additions of water from the brush will get the slightly thickened skin to flow again and remix with the underlying paint, but the extreme edges tend to dry a bit too much, forming a crust that doesn't re-wet. When I used to use a flat plastic palette, there would always be a low, but distinctly three-dimensional, ring of dried paint around the pool I was working from, along with the residual thin layer across the surface. That extreme edge crossed the threshold, beyond which it would no longer respond to water.