What I'm up to right now: Organisation, that's what

Tiers of Vallejo

I have a lot of Vallejo paints, and I'm getting more all the time. It's my favourite paint system; the ginormous range of colours available, the convenience of the little dropper bottles, the high pigment density and the good quality acrylic medium all float my nerdly boat. It's made me quite lazy about mixing shades though; with such a huge range available there seldom seems to be much need to put myself out in that respect.

Whenever I get a new bottle, the first thing I do with it is to paint its label and cap with some of the contents, so that I can see at a glance what the colour inside the bottle actually is, and what it will look like dry — an important consideration with acrylics, because they often alter substantially in tone between wet and dry.

The shambles that is my workspace

Anyway, a side-effect of having a vast number of individual shades is that one really does have to take thought for organisation, or else one spends most of one's time sorting through the mass to find the exact shade one wants. To that end, I'm in the process of building myself a rack to organise and display all those little dropper-bottles.

I made a stepped stand for them a while ago out of corrugated cardboard (you can see it in the image to the left) and that works well enough except that the steps have no lips or sides, so bottles can fall off quite easily. Also, I made the steps higher than they need to be, so I can't fit as many bottles on there as I want or need. Clearly improvements are necessary.

The new rack is more compressed, and will hold about 60% more bottles in the same space. I'm building it from Whakatane Board, which is a thick (4mm), coarse, stable cardboard, pale grey in colour. It's not quite as strong as MDF, but on the other hand I can cut it with a craft knife, and it's easily strong enough for this sort of thing — in fact it's a bit over-engineered for the purpose, but never mind. It glues well with plain old PVA.



It's going together pretty well, and I'm looking forward to being able to transfer all those dropper-bottles to their new home. The old tier can have some light card lips and sides added, and be used to store all sorts of other paints and glues and what-not.

Before you know it I'll be completely organised.

It could happen.