Building a Better Workbench - Painting on The Go

I suppose "Better" might be the wrong word choice here. In the days before the quarantine, (henceforth referred to as "the before times") I found myself painting at the shop once a week and frequently spending time outside of the house. At Cold Wars I spent quite a bit of time with the wonderful folks over at Hobby U chatting and painting. Thankfully everyone there was kind enough to provide or share supplies but I found myself spending a lot of time thinking of what kind of things I'd need for a travel set up, for things like shows, paint nights etc. After talking a bit with Impending Duff and seeing his set up at a class he ran here, I opted for the Creature Caster carrying case. This post is one part a review of that and one part my "must-have" tools, supplies, etc.

First up the bag.

I ordered the bag around the time Adepticon would have happened and postal issues aside received it pretty quickly. I opted to add on a couple extra trays but I'll get back to that in a moment. The bag by itself comes with a tray that will hold 48 paints and a sheet of 3" pluck foam.

As you can see the bag also has a strap and extra pockets for holding odds and ends. This pocket here has specific holders for brushes as well. Probably more slots than I'll need but a nice option.  The bag is high quality and at first glance at least seems to fill all my needs. of course this is before trying to fill it. 

I won't pretend to want to drag my (incredibly) messy desk with me on the road but it would be nice to be able to bring a single project with me depending on where I'm going. I think the bag was designed pretty clearly with the Pro-Acryl paints in mind but the Vallejo Bottles seem to fit just fine.

When picking and choosing what I want to bring with me I set out with the intention of basically having a home set up and a road set up separate. I'm incredibly fortunate to have easy access to a hobby shop so my original plan was to simply buy doubles of the key paints as a sort of neutral palette to start.

Here are what I deem "essential" These are basically paints that I use in the majority of my projects.

Vallejo

Leather Brown

Black Grey

Iraqi Sand

Burnt Umber

Beige Brown

Ivory

Panzer Aces

Flesh Base

Old Wood

Army Painter

Strong Tone

Dark Tone

Chainmail

Citadel

Fleshshade

Retributor Armor

Greenstuff World

Black Ink

This leaves 34 slots to add specific colors for specific tasks which should be more than enough. My one critcism is that the slots really aren't wide enough for the citadel bottles but The majority of my citadel "must haves" have been transfered into empty vallejo style bottles. If you're mostly using citadel, p3 or Tamiya for example, you'll want to take advantage of the pluck foam.

The next step in the storage war is essential painting accessories.

List is as follows

Red Grass Games Palette

Red Grass Games Palette Paper

Brushes

Hobby Knife

Super Glue

Citadel Handle

I'm sure it doesn't need much explaining as the logic here is pretty simple. The bare essentials for any given paint session. Not pictured is the wavy attachment for the palette but I definitely made sure to bring that with me as I use a lot of washes and that attachment is essential for that.

At this point I packed the bag up and discovered a pretty major criticism. The way the straps attach to the bag, picking the bag up by the strap results in it tipping 90 degrees immediately. If it was easier to keep level I'd be comfortable leaving it on with paint in the pallet but as is, I took the strap off. Perhaps loaded completely with paint it does level out but I don't see myself filling the case every time.

All in all I'm happy with the bag, even more so after taking the set up out of my normal hobby area and into the living room to test it out. I'm sure it'll get use when the isolation is over.

You can see that it really does have the room to get some painting done "on the go." In the future, I'll use the spare foams to pack specific projects to work on and switch out on the fly. The case would easily double as a carrying case for skirmish games like Kill Team as well which is a nice bonus. All in All I'm pretty happy and can recommend it. 

Heres what I managed to get done before retreating back into the hobby room.

Checking in from Quarantine

I'll admit I'm having some difficulty adjusting to the quarantine times and my actual hobby time has been a little sparse to say the least. It's been hard to paint wargame stuff when I'm not sure I'll get to use it again. With that in mind, I've shifted my focus over to finishing my Sisters of Battle in time for Stellacon. I painted this one during one of hour TrenchRunner Google Hangout Sessions.
This is the new Sisters of Battle Imagifier. I tried out contrast paints on the "statue" but probably could have achieved the same effect with a sepia wash or thinned out Iraqui sand. Can you tell I've been working on my Photo Booth?

Unfortunately that has been the only figure I've finished. We've been passing a lot of the time with Pandemic Legacy. For people not familiar with Pandemic, it's a co-op boardgame about dashing around the world and curing diseases. Players take actions each turn to treat diseases, move, or research the cure. Legacy cranks all this up to 11 by adding a campaign of sorts where actions in one game can affect the next. In legacy, you add stickers to the board and cards, tear things up and even open secret boxes that change the way the game works. It's all very exciting for someone who loves game design to see how it all comes together. I wont spoil anything else but if you're a fan of the original it is definitely worth checking out.

Finally I've been taking some stock on where I really want to go next. I had a big grand ambition to paint my game of thrones stuff but its been hard to be motivated to paint it right now with my regular gaming partner isolating. I recently interview Robey Jenkins about Horizon Wars: Zero Dark and I think I may try some solo Sci-fi gaming. Oathmarks caught my eye and I may give that a shot. All in all things will be scattered while I try and sort through finding my motivation