I’ve got about a quarter bottle of Testor’s Model Master Light Gray FS36495 that I thinned to run through my airbrush. It covered pretty well with the airbrush but now I have some touch up to do and what I have left is too thin to brush properly. I don’t want to buy more of the color because the amount of paint for each color, I originally purchased for this project, has been just right and after this is done I think I’m going to quit using oils for awhile.
Is there anything I can do to bring it back to its original thickness without messing up the color?
You could try touching up using the airbrush. I sometimes take a business card, cut out a small opening about the size of the area I need to touch up and use that as a mask to airbrush the affected area. Just don’t touch the business card to the surface of the model. Maybe keep it about 1/8th inch away.
Solvent loss through evaporation is about the only possibility. I suggest you take a small amount from the bottle and put it in an open container (an empty bottle will do) and stir periodically for several hours. The stirring is needed to keep it from skinning over.
This is another reason to only reduce the amount of paint needed for immediate use, leaving the original paint in the original bottle.
I had a large area to cover with the color and I knew that, inevitably, I had would have to use most or all of what was in the bottle, it’s only a half ounce bottle. What I dumped back in was what was left in my airbrush bottle after the last coat, the paint bottle itself was pretty much empty.
The airbrush idea is out simply because I’m out of air, it’s just a Kustom Kolor airbrush kit I got from Walmart for $30.00, and I don’t want to spend another twenty for a bottle of propellant that I won’t even use a quarter of.
I hadn’t even thought of letting it dry out a bit, my thinking was that paint had two states dry and wet, when I was trying to figure out what to do. My one track mind I guess.
I’ve noticed that if you have some paint that you have thinned for airbrushing and not used, if you let it set a couple of days (in a sealed bottle), the pigment and the carrier tend to seperate. You might try to siphon out a little of the carrier with an eyedropper. Just a thought.
The problem with that is that the “carrier” is the binder, and it usually doesn’t separate from the solvent nearly as fast as the pigment. So what you are siphoning off is both binder and solvent.