Pipettes - Pennies for Painting Precision

Most of the time, I'm a person that gets given advice, tries it out then I'll go back to my old ways. Occasionally, a really good bit will stick with me and it's one of those things that I'll share now.

When mixing your paint, how do you get it to the right consistency for the task at hand? How do you know exactly what the right mixture is? For a long time, for me the answers to those two questions were "mix in water with a brush" and "not a clue, I'll tell you when I see it".

Over the last few sessions, I've been giving something new a go. Well not new, but new to me. I've been using a pipette :)

I picked up a bag of pipettes on Amazon. I'd only wanted a small handful of them as I'll only be measuring out water with them, but it was just as cheap to pick up 100 as it was to buy 5. The 100 cost me the princely sum of £1.29.

They're all disposable plastic, with gradients up to 3ml. However, that is way more than we need.

Recently I've moved back from my wet palette to an actual palette instead of my old tile, giving me enough wells to set up enough paints for the task at hand. To start with, I used to add a few dollops of water with a large brush into each, add some mediums and then some paint. This didn't always give the most consistent approach so often there was a lot of readjusting water/paint levels mid way through.

The pipette allows you to learn how to make the right consistency for you. I started off adding 5 drops to each well in the palette 

I then added the mediums I wanted, in this case a single drop of Vallejo Matt Medium in each well.

Once that's in, I add the paint. Dropper bottle paints are perfect for this, as you can measure out the drops - pots like GW and P3 might need a little more working to get right. 

 Right now in the wells above are 5 drops of water, 1 of medium and 2 of paint. Different paints will need different amounts of water to thin them - Vallejo (the ivory tone in the top right) gets dilute a lot quicker than the Scale Color skin tones. The Scale Color Rlyeh Grey (top left) also dilutes fairly easily.

Once mixed together, you should be able to tell if they are of a consistency you want. This is all about personal preference and what you need for the task at hand. Too watery? Add a drop more paint. Too thick? Another drop or two of water.

To begin with, it's still the guessing game we had at the start. However, as you learn how many drops you need to add to dilute a certain tone after the initial mixing, you can add that amount to the well prior to adding the paint. Over time using a pipette should allow you to remove most guesswork from preparing paint, granting a little more time for actual painting.