Tuesday Tip: Paint Organization

It's striking that for such a right-brained hobby, with all it's scenery, painting, weathering and such, there are so many left-brained folks into it. Must be all the carpentry, wiring, electronics and trackwork. Such is The World's Greatest Hobby - and such explains why there may be so many layouts that never get beyond the Plywood Pacific stage.

As a pretty firmly left-brained guy myself - and having all but finished the layout up though the trackwork stage - I'm finding it a bit of a challenge to press through on scenery and weathering (it doesn't help that I'm colorblind). Fortunately, with a little lot of help from my friends - especially those much more in their "right" mind - I'm making some progress. But every once in a while, my lefty brain confronts the righty bits.

The following photos tell the story . . .

These are some of the paints I use for weathering & scenery. Well, I haven't actually used them yet, but at least I bought them and they're nicely arranged.

Speaking of "nicely arranged" - here are some of my other paints. The Apple craft paints are especially fun since they're only 50 cents each at Wal-Mart and dry dead flat. I know this since Bill has used them most - and I used them for weathering my ties. But, as you can see, the dropper bottles aren't labeled for easy reference (and I can't totally rely on "seeing" what color they are).

So out came the labeler, a tool that no self-respecting Type-A/OCDer would be without (thanks Roman!). So many cool fonts and sizes.... ahhhh..... nicely labeled now. Lord only knows whether I'll use them before they turn to bricks in the bottles.

So this looks all nice and relatively tidy - at least for an art/paint room. But not it's still not quite organized enough for my taste.

Many of us have stories of buying hairspray (aka scenery fixative), makeup applicators (aka paint/pigment applicators), and various sundry non-manly items for our hobby. So why not a Nail Polish Rack Display? And you can see from the above "unboxing" that I went all-in for acrylic painting supplies (suggested per Joe Fugate's excellent "MRH Acrylic Painting Guide" which can be obtained from the MRH website (for free! though a free subscription is required)).

I'm clearly running out of excuses for not painting....

But thanks to the new paint storage rack (aka nail polish rack), I'm no longer running out of space for painting. The new rack stored all of my Apple craft paints, as well as the TruColor/Vallejo dropper bottles - but note that it will not accommodate Floquil/PollyS paint jars, Badger's ModelFlex, Scalecoat, or AccuPaint jars.

As you might have noticed in the "unboxing" photo above, I bought 100 of those little dropper bottles to decant those troublesome paints into. But I don't think at the end of the day that even I am that OCD.