Painting with BB's

I dunno about you, but I really like Vallejo paints. Yes, they're expensive, but they are also really pigment heavy and cover everything. Even those problem colors like yellow and orange are so much better than anything else out on the market. In their little bottles, they last seemingly forever. I have some bottles that are probably five or six years old and they aren't dried out or even particularly thick. I don't use them for everything, still favoring a lot of cheap craft paints, but they are definitely a great tool in the toolchest.

I do have an issue with them however, and that is getting the paint out of the bottles. The pigment tends to stay at the bottom of the bottle, and sometimes no amount of shaking seems to mix the paint very well. And the tiny pin-hole spouts clog--ack, don't get me started.

On TMP I've heard others suggest dropping a BB in the bottle and using it for an agitator that flies around when the bottle is shaken, moving the pigment around and mixing it with the fluid inside. While at Long Beach, at a general store with BB's handy, I picked up a tube of Daisy's best steel shot. I've been using them since I got home, and eureka!! it works. Another measure I've taken to make my Vallejos a bit more user friendly is actually a little tool I've pilfered from my wife. She's a quilter, and uses long pins with a big head to pin her quilt squares together. These work much better to clean out the spouts than my collection of straight pins.

Anyway, these make me much more inclined to use my collection of Vallejo paints. Which means I'll use them up, and have to buy more at their inflated Spanish prices, meaning I'll be spending more on paint. I guess I can't win.