The Art of Appropriate Frugality

I've learned a valuable lesson today about stinginess.

I really like Vallejo polyurethane acrylic surface primers, and a while ago I bought several shades in 200ml bottles, as the paint works out a lot cheaper that way than buying it in smaller 60ml or 20ml bottles.

However.

If you're not using it fast enough — finishing a bottle within, say, a year or eighteen months — it starts to thicken in the bottle, and worse, it develops crumbs of sediment, presumably from paint drying on the inside of the lid and so forth, which will gum up your airbrush and force you into an emergency cleaning session, along with a constant stream of swearing.

Now I have a clean airbrush, and I've filtered and thinned the remains of the bottle of surface primer, and my hands are entirely black, and I've got black smears all over my workbench. But at least the rest of that particular bottle is usable again.

In future, I'll probably stick to buying the 60ml bottles. It will cost more money in the long run, but I think it will be less troublesome.

Note: I once was in the habit of always decanting paint intended for my airbrush through a filter, to avoid this very issue. The reliability and ease of use of Vallejo paints has really made me lazy in this respect... not too difficult, since laziness is my natural base-state.