The rack. Obviously this one would be absolutely rubbish for storing paint, apart from blood red I suppose. Maybe some bits of bleached bone ….

As your paint collection grows, space becomes a premium, I’m sure a lot of readers will have found this, especially when concerning those chubby little Citadel pots. I’d previously been using a stacking system from www.hobbyzone.pl and a fine paint rack it is. Solid laser-cut MDF, you can read Tony’s review of it here.

However, as the number of specialist paints increased, I found that the rack just wasn’t big enough, and it was already taking up a quarter of my work space, and I had paints in drawers, paints on the table, everywhere. Being anally retentive and mildly obsessive about stuff like this, it was bothering me. Then inspiration struck, but it struck Duggan, and I copied him, I’ll be honest. Why not ditch the overly bulky Citadel pots for dropper bottles? I use a wet palette, and an airbrush, I don’t strictly need flip lids any more, and they’re notorious for not sealing properly anyway, due to their awful design. After a few uses, they get paint round the lip in the lid, won’t close, and next time you use your paint its either the consistency of sour cream (fuck off lads), or its totally dried up.

So, the plan was to put all my paints in to droppers, then sling the droppers into a paint rack, saving me space on my workbench, and making my paints much more organised. Step one was to get the droppers. Thankfully, our own keeper of the Black Library, John ‘The Harlequin’ Marsden had already used and given the thumbs up to Ampulla. Basically, if you want to put something into something else, then these guys have your back. As it was, I was putting paint, into dropper bottles, and they sell just the thing really cheap. I also added some glass pipettes to the list for dropping medium, thinners and the like into my airbrush. For about 89p each, you can’t go wrong there either.

15ml Dropper Bottle in all its glory.

The service was quick, website was easy to use, and the bottles are great. 15ml droppers, with the little spouts and caps in separate pieces. Just add some medium to thin your Citadel paints, shake, and pour it in to the droppers, add the nibs then screw on the caps. Easy. Couldn’t be easier. Well it could if you had a really small funnel  to stop overflow, but there you go. You live and learn.

This is the pipette, 50ml, a snip at just 89p

NeXt was the task of finding a rack to put them in, this wasn’t as east as step one, and will be covered in my next article.