Tools of the Trade 2 - Selecting a Painting Station

Due to a change in personal circumstances, I no longer have the luxury of a dedicated area for my hobbies.For the most part, my hobby time is effectively restricted to 90-120 minutes in the evenings during the week or whenever the marauding three year old is otherwise occupied safely on weekends. Almost certainly this will be in the evenings as well.

My area of operations is effectively confined to the living room, so my set up must be portable, easily set up and broken down, and capable of being secured against the cats and the fore-mentioned two-legged Destructor.

So I'm going to need some kind of painting station set up that fits the above criteria and is within a modest budget of around $100-120 AUD. It will need to provide storage for all my tools, paints and basing materials while being capable of fitting within a 70L capacity plastic roll-away container.

Ideally, if my budget was not so constrained, I'd be able to go for the Frontier Gaming case although even then it does have that annoying issue of no self-contained integrated space for a cutting mat. 

I looked at the Army Painter paint station but it was a bit too basic for my needs and I've seen several issues raised regarding durability in other reviews that gave me pause.

In the end I went with a more expensive option: the Paint station from Miniature Scenery at $75 AUD including postage

There were a few points that sold me on this product:

1. Customisable at time of ordering. I could select different storage options and set ups for left and right sides to suit my needs.
2. An A4 sized cutting mat is included in the package
3. The inbuilt tablet/phone stand was a clincher - I will be using my iPad for reference purposes while painting and modelling, and having the phone close at hand offers me a separate option for other audio.

I originally was veering towards the option on the right which included a paint rack for a project sized selection of Vallejos. However I was recently also gifted some Vallejo paint racks (1 straight and two corner racks) as below:

This was an absolute boon, as I use 60ml and 200ml bottles a lot anyway. So I plumped for the paint station option that provided two media device stands and two storage drawers on the reverse. This also provides the option of two water pots and additional storage for tools.

There are a couple of additional storage options on the way with a view to the future but that can wait until next time.

The good thing is, I now have my painting set up on order and can concentrate on acquiring the first lot of miniatures and sorting out my basing options and theme for Sharp Practice.

Pete