Citadel Paints and dropper bottles.

I use Citadel paints as my main paint source, but I hate the stupid bottles they come in. Recently I've seen a lot of people using GW paints in dropper bottles. They buy empty dropper bottles and pour in the GW paint. So I decided to give this a go.

I bought a bag of 15ml dropper bottles from Amazon. There were 25 to a bag. The bag has a bottle, screw top and a dropper top that gets inserted after filling up with paint. It's a slow process but once done will give you better control of your paints.

Start by cutting off the lid from the paint pot. Pour in the paint. I use a coffee stirrer to scrape as much paint as I can into the new bottle. Some of the paints are exceedingly thick, so I drop in some Citadel Medium to thin it out. Water works too. Makes pouring easier. For the first batch I added in small stones to help mix the paint when shaking it.

Once poured, put in the dropper top and screw on the lid. Done. I go the extra step in peeling off the label and sticking it to the new bottle. I also paint the top of the lids so I can see what the colors are.

Here is the first batch of 25 done. Now that I know what's involved and I love the new bottles. I'll do the rest of the paints.

So I ordered 2 more bags and stainless steel agitator balls. They make them for Nail Polish.

It's a lot of work up front, but I think worth it in the end.

I ordered these off Amazon:
Dropper Bottles

Agitator Balls

Now back to paint pouring..,...Xin

Making pallets for scatter terrain.

I'm gearing up to play Games Workshop's new game, Shadow War Armageddon. I have almost no terrain for 40k style tables. I did pick up 2 box sets of the game, which comes with a ton of terrain, but you can never have enough terrain. 

I saw on the SWA Facebook page people making pallets as scatter terrain. I loved this idea so last night I rummaged around my basement and found some balsa wood to give it a go. 

 I'm not sure of the size I got, but it was about 1/8 inch(3-4mm) square balsa strip. I used sprue cutters to cut to about 1.5 inches(about 38mm)

 I used my cutting mat as a guide, put the balsa strips 1.5 inches apart(38mm). These are the stringers of the pallet.

 Put something on the strips to hold them in place to glue them. I used a 1-2-3 Block.

Using a low temp glue gun, glue on one coffee stirrer. This is the upper decking.  Glue it all the way to the end of the stringer.

 Glue another coffee stirrer to the other end of the stringer

 Glue one in the center.

Glue the last 2 in the open spaces between the center and each end.

Using a sprue cutter, clip off the over hangs. Clip up right against the stringer.

 Flip the pallet over and glue in the center stringer. Also glue in 3 coffee stirrers for the lower deck. One on each end and one in the center.

 All done.

I made 4 and ran out of the balsa strips to make the stringers.

 After digging through my basement I found another strip of balsa wood, enough to make 4 more pallets. 

This was a very easy project. All told maybe 2 hours, maybe less. I think I need about 4 more, and I'll be done with pallet making. 

Cheers, Xin