In order to get things done, you need a good painting and modeling station.

The picture to the right shows you my modeling station. Not horrible, but not too great either.

I threw the Games Workshop painting station down on my desk, but there’s no place to efficiently store my paints. In the picture, I’ve sorted all of my Vallejo paints on the paint station – but I can tell you right now that it no longer looks so neat.

I’ve always wanted a rack to organize and display my paints in a more efficient way. I found a few on the internet that I liked, but ultimately I think I’m going to build my own. Once I receive the order of wood for building movement trays, I’m going to use some of it to build a paint rack.

That’ll clear up a lot of real estate on the painting station, allowing me to leave out multiple units of models as I assemble and paint them.

It’ll also faciliate the storage and sorting of paints. As it is, they almost always end up clumped in a group on the left side of the paint station. Once they leave their homes in the neat and orderly row, they never go back.

Pre-fabbed Paint Stations

Searching around the ‘net, I found two pre-fabbed paint racks that I liked.

Silicon Dragons offers a nice wooden paint rack. It only holds Vallejo Paints, though. There are five rows of nine bottles for a total of 45 stored paint colors. The construction looks solid, and it holds a lot of paint for the small size (about a foot square).

The rack costs $35. There’s also a cheaper option, made with MDF instead of plywood, for $20. I’d say that’s a fair price – although I’d prefer to spend $20 instead of $30-40.

Unfortunately, this won’t do for me. My local gaming store stopped carrying Vallejo paints so I’m going to be slowly transitioning to Citadel. In the long run, I will definitely need a paint rack that holds Citadel sized paint bottles. I’d also like something that could accomodate the entire range of paints and washes (minus the foundation paints) – 55 paint bottles.

The other option I’ve found is from CNC Workshop. It looks like it’s made from balsa or basswood. It’s got a stadium seating type of layout, which looks cool and effective. It also holds both Citadel and Vallejo sized paints.

However, it only holds 33 paints. I’d need to buy at least two of these. The stadium layout also poses a problem, since I’d like something that fits up against the back of my desk’s hutch – above the existing paint station.

The rack is $32.00 Australian Dollars, which is a little over $20 American. It’s a nice paint rack for the price, but it just isn’t going to fit my needs.

The DIY Paint Rack

What do you do when you can’t find something that fits your needs? Build it yourself!

I’m envisioning a large paint rack that sits flush against the desk’s hutch. It’ll be about 1′ tall by 2′ wide (just as wide as the painting station).

In order to be more space efficient, I’m only going to build it to hold Citadel size paints. Chances of me going back to Vallejo paints are pretty slim if they don’t sell them locally, so I think that’s a safe bet.

With those dimensions, I can fit six shelves that are each about 2″ high. I’m going to add a spacer every 1 3/8″ to demarcate the space for each bottle (and so that I can easily go back and label where the bottles go).

That’ll make room for 90 paints – far more than I need. I’m guessing I’ll fill up 55 slots with the GW stock and then use some of the empty spots for custom mixes (or new GW paints down the road).

Now I just need to figure out exactly how I want to put this together, so that it doesn’t fall apart…

Once I get the order of craft plywood, I’ll draw up some more specific plans and post them here. If all goes according to plan, this will be a very cheap project ($10 of wood), so it should be a viable option for anyone looking for a paint rack.