Stef Paints
Looking across my hobby desk there's a bunch of tools I use all the time, some of which might be considered a little unusual. Here's my top 10 tools I can't live without, in no particular order.
This post contains links to products that I use. They are not affiliate links and I don't get any money if you buy them. I just think they're good products and wanted to share them. If you do buy them, I encourage you to shop around and find the best prices.
Over the years I've tried a lot of different brushes. Expensive, cheap, natural, synthetic - you name it I've given it a go. I always come back to the same trusted brushes though, and that's Windsor & Newton Series 7. Most of the time I paint with a 1 and a 0. I'll also have a larger brush at hand for transferring paint from pots to my palette - this will be any old cheap brush I have lying around.
An alternative to the Windsor & Newton brushes are Rosemary & Co Series 33. I recently bought a set of these and it's probably the first time I've not immediately gone back to the Series 7's. They're cheaper too which is a bonus. Right now I have 2 of each brand on my desk and I don't really think about which one to pick up.
A wet palette is essential for miniature painting in my opinion. It delays your paints drying while you're working with them and makes mixing colours so much easier. During a painting session, if you ever need to go back to a specific mix it's still there and usable. Quite simply, as soon as I started using one my painting improved without a doubt.
I currently use the Red Grass Games Studio v2 wet palette which I got on their Kickstarter. That said, for years I used a cheap plastic tub, kitchen roll and greaseproof paper. It worked just as well and cost a couple of quid at most.
Not especially exciting or specialised, but absolutely essential! I use kitchen roll all the time while I'm painting. Removing excess moisture from my brush, cleaning my airbrush, mopping up spillages (hey, I'm clumsy and it's happened more times than I'd like to admit). There's always a roll nearby and I rip a few sheets off before I start just so it's on hand.
I recently got a set of single blade nippers and the difference between those and regular clippers you get from Games Workshop is night and day. They just glide through plastic when removing parts from the sprue making such a clean cut that there's barely any clean up required. Plus parts never ping half way across the room to go an hide themselves in my grey carpet!
Liquid Poly Cement was sold by Games Workshop when I started the hobby back in the 90s. It was great, you brushed it onto plastic parts, they melted and then essentially welded themselves together. For some strange reason this product was replaced with a more gloopy gel-like poly cement which I never got on with. It was too thick, the hole in the bottle was too big so far too much came out, and then it went stringy too. Horrible stuff. Luckily, other companies like Tamiya and Humbrol still sell it in liquid form. A million times better for building plastic minis!
The hobby often calls for drilling holes. Pinning being one of the main reasons, along with drilling out gun barrels or exhaust stacks on vehicles. For years I used a regular old pin vice, which was fine. Recently I picked up a Wowstick which is a battery powered drill and it makes drilling these things so much easier! The only downside is that you can't put regular drill bits in it, so if I need to drill anything bigger then it's back to the pin vice. That said, I think that's only happened once since I've owned it so it's good for nearly all my needs.
I bought these sanding sticks on Amazon pretty cheap, and they're great for sanding down small parts to remove mould lines. I find them so much better to work with than classic needle files. You get a bunch of different grits in the pack, which is kind of a shame because I don't think I'll ever use the larger grits, but you get so many that it's still worth it.
I bought a set of tweezers thinking they might come in useful and I find myself using them much more than I expected! They are such handy for holding parts in place while glue dries, or just generally working with really small parts. Definitely would recommend picking up a set if you don't already have some.
The humble tooth pick serves two purposes for me. Firstly, I used it when cleaning my airbrush to shift any dried paint that's built up in the nozzle. That said, I did recently pick up a nozzle cleaning kit which does this job much better. Secondly, the more I work with green stuff the more I realise how useful tooth picks are for moving it around and shaping it. Definitely worth having a pack of these on your hobby desk.
Storage is essential. We hobbyists accumulate a ridiculous amount of stuff and if you only have a small hobby space like me, Really Useful Boxes make storing a lot of stuff much easier. I have quite a few now, storing paints, tools, bits, scenery and miniatures. Especially if you magnetise your miniatures like me then you can use them to transport your army to and from games.
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