Welcome to my Studio

One of the spare bedrooms is used as my painting studio. I painted it in Midnight Green (Fly, Eagles, Fly), but just along the bottom. The majority is pale grey so that it has a lot of light for painting. I installed some laminate flooring as well, which is much more forgiving of paint and water spills than carpet, and it allows me to easily find dropped bits of minis - something that would take me ages to find in carpeting. It was always quicker to just grab a new space marine head than try and paw through the berber for one I had dropped!

Here's a little tour of the space, starting to the right as you enter through the door.

There's the display cabinet, full of painted miniatures. The shelving hidden in the bottom half holds some supplies, but mostly it is primed models awaiting paint.

Next to that is a music stand that holds all my reference material. Recipe books, concept art, reference pictures - anything I need to... well, reference while I work. It sits just to my right as I sit in my painting chair - which brings us to:

The painting desk! Paint racks hold my variety of paints. You can see I re-bottle most of them - the P3 and the GW - into dropper bottles. You'll also see that the ones I use the most, the P3 Paints, are front and center, easy to hand. Two water jars - one for rinsing the brush or normal paint, the other for metallic paint only. Rinse in the same jar, you're liable to get those metallic flakes in your normal paint. And I don't know what I'd do without my Ott-Lites.

Boba Fett?!? Boba Fett?!? Where?!?

Directly to the left of that is my build desk:

I like having the separate area for building, so I don't have to worry about getting plastic shavings and metal filings in my paints. Bookshelf extenders make great table-top shelving for the tiny stuff we work with. These, and the two desks, are from Ikea. There are more bookshelf extenders on the floor, one under the paint desk, one next to the build desk, to keep even more items easily accessible and organized.

On the next wall is a dresser unit that stores a bunch of raw materials, half-built kits, spray paints, and a metric butt-ton of dice. On top of this I am able to have my photo booth perpetually set up. The tripod folds up and stores easily in the closet when not in use. Note the four light sources for photography - one above, one from either side, and then a hand-held one (the black clip-on) that I point in from the front. All inside a white light cube that bounces all that light around nicely. Daylight-type, or "Reveal" bulbs work great. Avoid yellow lights like "soft white," or the greenish tinge of awful fluorescents.

Then the final wall, the closet (when we walked in, this is to the left in line with the doorway). I've rigged the inside of the closet with a pegboard to house the racks of unpainted blisters, while the left side holds shelving that racks my storage bins of sorted and organized un-sprued "Bitz." Above these photos are shelves that store trays and trays of Battle Foam, and all the junk that didn't fit elsewhere.

Thank you for joining me on this episode of MTV's Nerd Cribs!