Paintbrush and dipper bottle racks assembled

For some time I was thinking about how to organise my present workplace. Especially with the presentation of the paints I wasn't lucky at all but the racks and stands I discovered so far were either not to my taste or simply too expensive. Building my own didn't come into question since I judged me too clumsy and the task too time consuming. Finally a few weeks ago I stumpled onto Loki's longship and read his interesting posts about how he re-organised his workbench. From the moment I saw them I was fascinated by of the racks and dropped Diane from Warbases an email whether they could and would offer them for sale as well.

She was as kind and helpful as ever and for shipping reasons recommended a smaller layout than Andrew has. However 45 bottles seemed fine to me and I ordered three of the racks promptly. Just a week later I they arrived and I'm satisfied beyond words. Indeed Diane and Martin are excellent craftsmen as well as incredibly nice and helpful people.

Anyway the rack comes in six parts. Four sides and two sheets with holes to hold the dipper bottles. In case that you order more than one of them make sure not to mix up the sheets. The holes for the bottles themselves are slightly larger than those for the caps. Well-conceived but a but difficult if the builder is too eager. Nevertheless all the parts fitted perfectly and I didn't need more than a drop of PVA glue to assemble them:

The paint bottle rack.. Assembly time about 10 minutes.

Additionally I needed a new solution to store my brushes. For the last months I had them lying in an old plastic pot but I wanted to have them tidier, better sorted, nicer presented... Something like that. So I explained Diane my idea of a rack to store the brushes horizontically and sent her a picture of a comparable rack. My idea was the kind of racks that are used for Japanese swords. As usual no problem for Diane and Martin. They took the rack into production and for £3.00 one of the first ones was mine. I was pretty curious how it would look because I didn't have a picture of the finished prototype so far but what reached me on tuesday was exactly what I though of:

Paintbrush Rack for six or more brushes... Assembly time about 2 minutes.

So finally after two evenings I had my workbench sorted and the colours nicely presented. Last step will be to label the bottoms of the bottles to have an instant view on the numbers of the colours. I think for my purposes that works better than labelling the racks because I want to keep the chance to re-organise the bottles if necessary without having to re-label all the racks.

My workplace in inactive state and ready for action.

Well that's it. Let me finish this post with many thanks to Andrew for the inpiration his blog gave and especially to Diane and Martin for their kind assistance and the excellent items they produce. I'm looking forward to meeting them on Crisis this November hopefully !