Since moving house, I’ve decided to move away from my purely black undercoat to roughly dry brushing layers of increasingly lighter grey and white to allow me to use contrast and other similar tools on my models while still retaining a similar feel to the older models I’ve painted and are still in my collection. The problem with this for me is that I’ve been absolutely chewing through my supply of kitchen paper due to all this drybrushing, which is a problem when I already need it for 3D printing and actual kitchen tasks.

However, while browsing my Facebook feed, a friend of mine posted this Youtube short (which I’ve embedded below or can be found here) which got me thinking.

As someone who has been hobbying for roughly 10+ years solid at this point (and several more before that at a slower pace), I’ve been building up a stockpile of bits. Lots of these are items I may actually use in the future, but a lot more is just the odds and sods any wargamer slowly collates and shoves into a drawer. So I had a few things to stick down to build a drybrush texture pallet

This is what I ended up making. The big things are two Mighty Empires titles (from a White Dwarf cover from back before I rejoined the hobby) as well as an Anvil Industry tankette I printed ages ago as a test and then never got around to doing more with. A clipped Sigmar banner from my Stormcast, some spare USMC heads from Empress and a White Dragon Miniatures figure (placed on his front so I have the molle loops for texture fun) finished off the full bits while a piece of resin sprue filled out some space. To this, a layer of PVA glue and then sand (which I no longer use for basing due to my Geek Gaming Scenics mixes) finished off the effect.

The end result, after a black undercoat, is a little tray for getting my brushes with hr. I still need to spend some time getting used to it, but my quick test with getting my White Dragon Taliban ready did end up feeling much easier to keep the paint under control. I’ll report more about my adventures using it as time goes on, and more importantly how much kitchen paper I can save.

Also, I guess I should get painting these guys huh.

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