Friday, June 15, 2012

From the Desk: Droppers!

So I finally bit the bullet and transferred all my P3 paints into dropper bottles. It was a fair amount of work, but I believe it was worth the effort. I first considered doing this when I started a black and white study piece and made up some of my own shades of grey using P3 white and black. As a part of doing this, I mixed them and put them in droppers which turned out to be not as hard as I expected, and well worth the effort in terms of speed and simplicity. Making the leap to do the rest of them in droppers only took a slight extra nudge, courtesy of Justin.

Now, knowing that this isn't for everyone, I'm not going to promote that everyone run out and do this. I will however share my reasons for going through this effort:
  1. Droppers are easier to use with an airbrush
  2. I'm always thinning my paint now, so using a dropper helps me maintain better ratios of water to paint
  3. When mixing multiple paints, droppers are just faster than using a brush to scoop and mix
  4. When mixing multiple paints, droppers are definitely more precise
  5. After 20 years of painting on and off, and trying out 9 different lines of paints, I just happen to like droppers better

3 comments:

loftybloke said...

Hey man, I'm curious as to how you went about transfering the paint with minimum loss?

I'm going to be picking up an airbrush and moving onto P3 so this would be great

Thanks a lot
Lofty

Viruk said...

I feel the same about dropper bottles and I also put some of my most frequently used colors from P3 range into them :)

Scott said...

@Lofty: To be honest, I didn't worry about losing too much paint, but I'll do a follow-up post later today with tips about transferring to droppers.