Reconstituting Dylusions Paints

My Dylusions paints went on vacation with me this summer --  from the hot temperatures in Texas through the heat (and fires) into New Mexico then onto Arizona (111° at 9 p.m. at night!!) and down into Southern California.  We had temperatures there mostly around the high 70s but a few into the 90s as well.  I played with my paints during my 2-week stay a little bit, they took couple trips to the beach and then they made the return journey back to Texas in my car.  (Taking the northern route which was a bit cooler and the fires had been extinguished.)  I do the drive in one straight shot so they didn’t spend an extended period of time in the car.   I’ve been home about a month and took them out to play recently and they looked dried out.  I know that Dyan has said to give them a spritz or 2 of water before closing them up to keep them fresh.  But I wanted to get them out to play, I wasn’t preparing to store them.  So I thought if a spritz of water is okay, then a bit more water couldn’t hurt.  I mean that’s what we normally do with dried out paint, right?  Wrong.
This is what happens when you add too much water to your Dylusions paint.  It becomes like chunky cottage cheese.  I thought that maybe I just didn’t mix it up well enough and maybe a bit more water would thin it out.  This was the second jar that I tried adding water to – the first one grew so much that I had to put some of the paint into a second container!

This is the white paint that I added more and  more water, too.  It just wasn’t sinking in that I wasn’t treating my paint properly until I also did the same to the pink paint.  Then I finally had my “a ha” moment.  (This was an empty Truvia jar so it’s quite large, about twice the size of the Dylusions jar.)  I did this to the white and then put the ruinous water into the pink paint.

This just wasn’t right.  So I headed off to the craft store to look at what mediums were available to see what I could use to rescue my Dylusions paints.  This is what I found – Golden regular gel (semi-gloss).  It looked right, seemed to have the right feel and consistency.

So I got home and added some to my black Dylusions paints - just a shmear -- don't glop it in there.  All it needed was a bit to get it smoothed out and it looked like this:

I was pretty happy with that so I did the same thing with the white to see if I could “fix” it from the mess I’d made.  This was the result:

Hurray!  Rescued my Dylusions paints.  Will do follow-up post on what I did with the chunky pink and how the paint worked after the Gel was added.  Now I don’t know how the gel medium may change the properties of the paint but it did what I wanted – which was to get back the right feel of the paint.