I finally did it! I finally transferred all my P3 and Citadel paint to dropper bottles! I’m beyond pumped. In case you do not know, miniature paint brands such as P3 and citadel put paint in containers which are not easy to retrieve paint from to put on my wet palette. For a long time I always though citadel paint bottles you were supposed to directly paint from due to their design with lid collected paint for easy retrieval, but discovered the magic of thinning your paint a bit over a year ago.
If you have not done so I highly recommend doing it. I have had a terrible time with Citadel paints drying out and never lasting due to the difficulty of closing the lid completely. P3 paints have always been so hard for me to use out of the bottle. I ended up using a lot of toothpicks to transfer paint to my wet pallet and always wasted so much in the process. Overtime I naturally gravitated to the paints that were already in bottles like Vallejo Model Color and Army Painter. So I finally pulled the trigger to investigate a better solution.
I spent a good deal of time watching YouTube videos on how to transfer and why. Here is a list of a few that I found useful and why.
Spikey Bits Youtube channel: I loved this video due to giving ideas on assembly line transferring.
Epic Duck Studios: Gave me the confidence to pour directly from paint bottle to dropper bottle
RobPaintsModels: He uses a funnel into the dropper bottle if you are not confident.
Material List
toothpicks
Optional: Stainless Steel mini funnels
Method
- Take the paint bottle you want to transfer and sit next to a dropper bottle without a lid. Shake paint up well or use a toothpick and stir if it is too separated.
- Detach the lid of the paint bottle from the container. Although not required and I personally rarely did so, this helps spilling as the lid could drip while you are pouring.
- Check to see how viscous the paint is. If paint is stiff and not much flow go to step 4. If you feel like you can already pour it into the bottle go ahead and do so.
- Using the Flow Aid use the plastic eye dropper to transfer approximately 1 mL of material to the paint. If you feel like your hand is too shaky you can pour into the stainless steel funnel listed above. I did not do this and surprisingly found it easy to not spill.
- Special Note: I found that my citadel paints were significantly dried out and required approximately 2 mL of flow aid. P3 paint was significantly easier and did not need as much
- Special Note Part 2: Sometimes if your paint bottle already has paint coming off the side the paint would flow down the bottle instead of into the dropper bottle. Simply rotate the paint container so the paint will not flow down that path to elevate the issue.
- You can absolutely add more flow aid slowly depending on your personal preference of thickness in your paint.
- Using the toothpick I would direct paint into the dropper bottle and help scoop out more (think like a spatula but for paint). You can also continue to slowly add more flow aid to your paint. However be careful to not water your paints down too much.
- Continue doing so until dropper bottle is full or you are happy with the amount of paint removed from the bottle.
- Add a stainless steel ball to the bottle. This is useful to shake up the paint in the future.
- Add the dropper and lid to the dropper bottle to close it up.
- You can slowly remove the label from the original paint container to the dropper bottle. This was incredibly easy for citadel paints and P3 paints took more patience. This is of course a nice final touch and great for documentation sake in the future.
- You are done. Keep repeating the steps and you are good to go!
Overall the process was not difficult but took some time to do. It took me approximately 3 to 4 hours to over 20 bottles but my household was full of distractions. Also I only needed 1 3ml eye dropper but bought a package previously as I use them for creating my own washes.
Now that all my paint is of a uniform size I can work on making a nice paint holder for it too! Next up, organizing my paint.
I hope you found this helpful. If you have anything to add, don’t hesitate to say something in the comments.