From the Desk: Droppers (part 2) and Organizing My Paints

In response to a question from my previous post, here's more information that you probably ever wanted about transferring to droppers and my overall paint management strategy...

Transferring the P3 paints from pots to droppers was not a huge deal, however I should note a couple key things that helped:

• To aid in the pouring, I sometimes used wooden coffee stirrers to guide the paint as I poured it from the pot into the dropper. This cost a little bit of paint, but dramatically reduced the amount of accidental spillage, particularly for those paints that were thicker.
• Once doing an initial pout of the paint into the dropper, I would add several drops of water to the pot, close it, shake the heck out of it, and then pour the remaining paint in. This often recovered considerably more paint than the water that was added to get it. The net dilution effect was minimal and honest somewhat favorable.
• I wasn't super concerned about "paint loss". I knew there would be paint stuck to the sides of the pot and I decided it wasn't worth my time to meticulously scrape a few cents worth of paint from the insides of each pot.
• Most of my paint pots were roughly half full or more, so there was plenty of paint to recover. A few pots were quite low and I simply bought more paint for those.
• Some of the older and more used paints had big "chunks" of dried paint in them. In those cases I didn't worry too much about trying to fish out the chunks because, quite frankly, it would have been very messy and would have meant losing significantly more paint. Eventually I'll probably just clean out the droppers entirely when the paint gets low enough.

So here's a shot of my paint racks. You'll notice that I store most of the paints horizontally which saves me a lot of space. I also put the paint color on the top of the cap to make it easy to find them. For anything that's a wash I'll put the color as an X. For anything that's an ink I'll put a circle of black around the cap.

There are plenty of paints that I didn't transfer. Specifically the GW Foundations and the metallics. Mostly because both those have tendencies to be thicker and can clump up too much for a dropper.

Anyway, that's enough of that. I'd love to hear from other people about what makes their organizational system work well for them.