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So I have somewhere between 20 and 30 cans of citadel paints that have dried out or separated.

Here's my plan:

Start with the standard add water and mix, but rather than mix them all the way to being usable again, as it would likely take a few hours, I will just put maybe a minute into each pot.

Then I tape each one shut. Throw them in small plastic sandwhich bags, then throw a few small sandwich bags worth into larger freezer bags, then throw all the freezer bags into a garbage bag, tie it shut, and throw it in the dryer on a spin only / no heat cycle for 60 minutes.

Is this hairbrained or genius?

Probably wrong work. Once the paint hardens you can't just rehydrate it like dried peas.

Hmm I guess you'd need to grind the dried paint to super fine powder and mix it with some kind of liquid acrylic medium as a pigment? Your method might work for watercolor but I think citadel paints are more 'complicated'

I don't think your method is likely to do anything, unfortunately. A dryer simply does not spin in a way that would really agitate the paint. How you ever seen how an industrial paint mixer does it? It is not tumbling the paint, it is violently shaking it back and forth. And mind you, that is simply to mix paint that is totally viscous. There is a way to mix things with a sort of cyclical motion, but not via a tumbling motion realistically.

That being said, as QAR said, there is a big, big difference between trying to make dry paint a liquid again, and simply rehydrating paint that might have somewhat separated. Dry paint can't be made liquid by simply adding water, it simply isn't polar enough to break the acrylic bonds that have been made.

You guys haven't done this before?




I've done this for years, and only in extreme cases it doesn't work.

I accept the argument that tumbling might not be the right motion for the job, but to say you can't simply re-hydrate paints and shake them? It's been done for years.


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Of course unless there is an argument against this process in general, like if we're aware of a non-immediately apparent negative to this process, I would definitely like to know about it!

I done that a whole bunch, having been out of the hobby for something like 7 years. But there is a big difference between paints that are somewhat dry and paints that are totally dried out.

Obviously, if you put water in and it can be stirred, it wasn't totally dried out. If it is hard as a rock though, water won't help. I guess that is your "extreme case?"

So just saying "dried out" paints doesn't really give us much of a clue if the paint is salvagable or not without more information though.

What I mean by dried out is what you see in the video

If its only semi srt paint, you could add some flow improver and drying retarder to help out too. I have no idea if that would work but an educated guess would suggest it might.

Got no idea about the drier idea but nothing else it sounds like it wouble be funny...

Adding a ballbearing of some kind makes agitating paints much more efficient; a glass bead or a marble or something will do. Just something that won't rust or anything, it makes a surprising difference to how easy it is to mix around paints.

Adding a physical agitator is a brilliant idea! I wish I'd done it.

So I did it. I checked at five minutes, twenty, an hour, then I put them in for another hour. Time involved in preparing the redundancies to protect the drier make this much less time effecient than the traditional shaking. The time spent was definitely easier, though.

For the basic mixing of slightly dried paints, it reached maximum efficiency at twenty minutes. I only checked a few cans so I can't say for sure, but with the cans I checked I couldn't discern a difference between twenty minutes in and a hundred and twenty minutes.

Also I used a whole lot of strong tape and uncommonly shaped ziplock bags which I have on hand for my job (no, I'm not a drug dealer) If I didn't have the tape and bags, I don't know if I still would have done this.

I had one can of quite dead and separated paint, which has that 'sandy' texture. Neither the drying or the traditional shaking has recovered it. It was Warboss Green, and I'm painting orks right now so I'm kind of stalled until I get a new can.

So I shook up about 25 cans of paint in a way that was less exhausting than manually doing it, but spending way too much time to set the whole thing up. Just the right kind of thing to try to take care of covid19 boredom.

In the future if I put my paints away and pull them out a year later to find out 20+ are gummed up, I would do this again with a ball bearing in each can and take them out after twenty minutes, just to see if the ball bearing can push this into being a worthwhile method.