It’s only a matter of time, on any hobby-centered site/channel/billboard/space shuttle, that the Eternal Debate of Our Time will eventually be had: pots or droppers?
It’s silly, right?
Probably calling it silly lost me two of my three subscribers.
But Games Workshop seems to want to keep this debate alive because they’ve just released their new Warhammer Tone Pro line of paints. And despite literal decades of people begging GW to abandon their, admittedly, sometimes shitty pots, they chose their side… and pots it was again. In terms of graphic design, one has to hand it to them as the colors look vibrant and alive in the pots. But there will just be no convincing some people.
It really is a thing: paint pots or droppers.
So let’s go all the way. Let’s lose all of my subscribers as I embark on a journey to explain why paint pots might just be the better way to store model paint. And, while dropper bottles do have their advantages, they’re not so great as to earn all their praise and the seemingly superior reputation. In short, I’m going to explain why GW made the right choice.
Dropper Bottles
In the land of dropper bottles, everything is golden. The electorate votes your way, every time, and you never waste paint because it’s all safe inside a capped bottle you can access one drop at a time. And, for sheer ease, this is probably true. (Maybe not the voter thing but the other thing.) Reaching for a bottle and adding a drop onto your palette is about as simple a way to access your paint as you can get. The nice thing is, if you buy your paint in droppers from Army Painter, for instance, the bottles even come with a little steel mixing ball. So everything is coming up aces!
But is life in dropper town as great as advertised? I mean, are the streets actually paved with cheese?
I would argue… no.
I’m not saying things aren’t pretty good. But there are two things proponents of dropper bottles rarely bring up. First, dropper bottles dry out, too. Not in the same way paint pots do but, in some ways, in a much more annoying fashion. The paint inside the dropper bottle might be fine. Where droppers dry out is usually in passage between, the little valve that keeps the air out and allows someone to squeeze out a drop or two. Now, most of the time, this kind of works itself out. A little pressure and whatever seal was there breaks and you’re back in business. But… when it does fail, it fails disastrously. The seal pops out and then you’re left with a palette flooded with half a bottle of a single color.
There’s a meme about spilling a Citadel wash and the Wolf of Wall Street chanting, “One of us! One of us!” because it’s happened to everyone painting miniatures at some point. Those wash pots are damned high, which is why my friend 3D-printed me a nice little holder. But, before you get one, you inevitably lose at least one pot of wash to an inadvertent twitch of your hand. Everyone knows about it and it’s just accepted as a rite of passage.
For some reason, a dropper bottle popping and emptying on your palette hasn’t reached the same level of acceptance, probably because the pots vs droppers issue has reached religious levels of significance and no one is eager to talk about where their side falls down. But it happens. And it’s happened to everyone who uses droppers. And, if it hasn’t yet, it’s because they’ve probably just recently switched. Put in the hours and it will happen.
The second issue is that, with a dropper bottle and because of the physics of liquid surface tension, you always get a single drop of paint, regardless of whether you need a little or a lot.
Do you want to pull out just enough color to do an eye? You get one drop. Do you need to just do some final highlights on the high points of knuckles and noses? One drop.
This isn’t the end of the world. But people who swear by dropper bottles usually use “saving paint” as a point of argumentation. But if you only need a tiny little bit, just a wee amount, get ready to wriggle that valve out because otherwise you get your one drop. And if you do wriggle that valve out, well… welcome back to pots-ville.
Pots
To be honest, I think P3 may be the only other major paint manufacturer out there besides Citadel that puts paints out in pots that isn’t Revell packing them into model airplane kits. But this is the old school way of getting your miniature paint. See: Revell. Now, the way we go about putting it on models once out of the pot has changed. Back in the 90’s, we just dipped our brush into an open pot and smeared what came out all over our expensive miniatures. Now we place it on a wet palette and thin it down a little before the smearing happens. It’s much more civilized. Anyone can see that.
But is this way… worse?
The biggest argument against pots isn’t that it’s a bad way to get paint on your palette, because it’s not hard. Dip a brush in the pot, bring it out, roll it onto the palette, Bob’s your uncle. The issue is usually what happens to any paint that’s on the rim. You put the cap back on, that paint dries inside and, after a few uses, it forms a ring of dried paint that allows in air that then dries out the pot. And, yeah, without proper maintenance, it’s bad. But there’s an upside to this as well.
And upside to paint pots?
Yes! To proponents of dropper bottles, there’s no reason to use a paint pot, ever. They’re a shit mechanism for storing paint and you should transfer your paint to a dropper basically as soon as you break the seal on the pot if you want to save time, money, and your sanity. But there’s one major upside. You can take just a tiny amount of paint at a time.
With a paint pot, you can use your detail brush to fish out the tiniest little dab of paint for a tiny little task. Sometimes all that’s needed is a pin-head sized dollop of paint, to be heavily thinned down with water, to be applied as just the very final layer on something. But, as stated above, with droppers it’s always one drop of paint regardless of how little is needed.
When the argument about paint pots and their wastefulness is made, I honestly think that most times people are remembering the pots that came out around the time of 40k, Third Edition. There was a screw-top pot that had a terrible seal. They came out during my break from the hobby but I’ve heard the horror stories. But these pots were discontinued over fifteen years ago. In contrast, with the modern paint pot, I still have paints from 2019 that remain just as liquid as they were the day I bought them. This doesn’t prove that the problem has gone away, just that critics of the pot may still be thinking about their screw-top nightmare.
Wrap Up!
Is there a perfect side? No. Much like electoral politics and street paving material, the sad reality is that nothing is perfect. But is there a side that is better? Then, I’d have to say, yes there is. And pots edge out droppers if only by just a slight amount.
It won’t save anyone’s life and it isn’t the cure for cancer but paint pots offer just a little bit more flexibility for the minor hassle of having to remove a dried paint ring from the cap now and again. Like many a teapot, they’re short and squat such that, unlike washes, they don’t tend to get knocked over, so losing a lot of paint is rarely an issue. Whereas, droppers work fantastically until they don’t. And then they fail spectacularly at the cost of a lot of paint.
This isn’t the popular view and readers will no doubt find a million YouTube videos explaining exactly the opposite. But, here at spudWorks, we stand by our paint pots.
