Make a Painting Station n Painting Rigs / Holders

Painting Station

This article will briefly go over how to make a painting station.  Basically its a rig to hold miniatures with, and in a second article I'll go over a technique called "dipping" used to auto shade miniatures once your done painting them.  I'm recycling this info from a post from one of my old blogs, just a fyi as its good info.


First thing I wanted to do was to make a painting station The station itself is very crude. It consists of 2 pieces of MDF board, each 1x1 ft, are the top and bottom. 4 additional pieces in a rectangular shape, 4in x 1 ft, make up the sides. The bottom and sides are secured with corner braces or "L" brackets. I then used a hole saw, and drilled 15 1 and 1/4 in holes, in rows of 5 across.  Note when drilling the holes you might want to hold some scrap board behind the mdf board or you'll get a lot of "blow out" where the back of the mdf board will rip out.  I didn't protect the board when I drilled and the back of the board now has nasty tears and divots from where the drill bit broke through the mdf board.  The last thing I did was to attach the top then with a few hinges so the entire top now flips up.  You can't really flip it up when you have the painting handles in the station but you can store all of your painting supplies in the "box" when done.  If I were to build a second one I would put the hinges on to one of the side boards so that the side swings opens instead and maybe have it so that the bottom slides on drawer slides out to the side so you can have things drying in the station and still get at the interior supplies.  The front section you can just use a regular drill bits in various sizes and use them as brush holders, if you have a router you could hollow out a section so that there is an indentation which you could use for a paint pallet area or similar tool holding area.  The idea is to customize the box to fit YOUR needs.

Painting Rig

So after constructing the station, I also picked up from the hardware store a 15 ft piece of "D" shaped or 1/2 in half circle moulding. I then had the store employee cut the molding down into 6 in. sections. This gives you 30 pieces of 1/2 in "D" shaped mouldings. Take two of these half circle mouldings and place them back to back and you've got essentially a 1/2 round dowel. Our 30 pieces translates into 15 painting rigs.  the last thing you do is place some rubber bands around the two mouldings at each end to secure the two halves together. You now have a secure holding mechanism for most miniatures, and it was pretty cheap! I think it was around $10 bucks.

Painting Rig Full View

All you do is roll the rubber band down the dowel towards the center to loosen the grip and then  insert a slotted figure and roll the rubber band back up to secure and tighten the painting rig.  If you don't have slotted figures then just take a paper clip and drill a couple of pin hole in the bottom of your figure and glue the paper clips into those pin holes and trim them to about 1/2 in.  If you use smaller pins than 1/2 the figures might slip out of the rig if not secured properly when you're painting them.  When you're done you can use the pins to secure to a base or clip flush.  Just when you pin make sure to use two pins and make sure they are aligned properly so the rig can grip them correctly.

Hope you enjoyed this post and thanks for stopping by!