Keeping Quickshade fresh - Start of a long-term project

A lot of people appreciate the advantages of Armypainter Quickshade and so do I. It's an excellent shading fluid, protects the miniatures as kind of varnish and makes it much easier and faster to paint numerous miniatures in a reasonable ammount of time.

Nevertheless Quickshade has its downsides. It's not water based so you need a certain solvent to clean the brushes, it smells unpleasently and probably anhealthy but worst of all it tends to clod after a rather short time. I've read a lot of repords from people whose Quickshade clodded although they tried seal the can as good as possible. I presume it's just impossible to seal it hermetically after it was opened once and some paint was spilled over its rim. Unfortunately all my attempts to re-thin Quickshade were in vain. White Spirit didn't work although it was mentioned in the directions for use...

Before and after...

Anyway a friend of mine gave me the hint to decant the Quickshade into small plastic bottles. Those are cheap, rather easy to acquire and should be more or less air-tight. So I bought a package of small liqueur bottles, emptyed them into a larger bottle and removed the labels. Finally I bought a new tin and was well prepared for the last step. Yesterday evening I took a large syringe anddecanted the whole content of the freshly opened Quickshade can into eleven tiny bottles.

It woked better than I feared. The tin contained fresh and fluid paint. The pigments were easy to stir and the syringe took the Quickshade very well. Nothing was spilled over my workspace, no blothes on my clothes or hands. Actually a bit too perfect...

Anway I hope Holger will be right after all and the portions will stay fresh until I need them. From time to time I'll give you a short updaten here when I open a new bottle.