I have a problem.

I buy too many paints.

That’s it, I said it. Don’t tell my wife though.

I fell in love with dropper bottles and a good wet palette as soon as I tried them and I couldn’t stop trying new brands of paint! In the end, I purchased the Army Painter Fanatic paint range, but not the “simple pack”, no, I went insane and purchased the Complete Edition (Which you can't buy anymore).

Main issue?

Well, it’s stored in cardboard boxes

Let’s list some of the problems:

1. It looks really cheap
   
2. They managed to fit a lot in a box, but once you take the paint out, they won't go back in… the classic mystery of packaging
   
3. It takes an insane amount of space

I wanted an easy way to handle this. So I started thinking…

Step 1: Don’t reinvent the wheel

I started to look at what's out there.

Obviously, you have those stairs-like paint stands, but I really don’t like them because you have an insane amount of dead space just behind it and they never really give you a smart way to use it.

Obviously, most products are trying to keep that dead space as little as possible, but it's clearly not possible with the design they're going for.

So I tried something else, something that would allow me to store more in my small space alongside my “to paint” miniatures (what we also call a pile of shame… I have 3 boxes of shame. Leave me alone).

I found this brilliant idea online. Would love to quote who made it but I just can’t find it anymore, as if the model was deleted (if you know who it is, please let us know in the comments so I can add the link here).

Outside of my… questionable colour choice, this rack had a load of problems.
Without glue, it wasn’t working
The holes were weirdly too big
It’s very flimsy and unstable
You need to manually split it to make it work (because my printer can’t print that big of a side)

I did try to look for other vertical racks, but they just either didn't have the right numbers of paint space - like this example from Perecil - (Army Painter Warpaint Fanatic colours are best grouped by 6), either the design was just not my thing - such as Diegomg amazing work - I prefer my paint to be slightly tilted, not fully flat.

Well then, it was time for me to get to the design!

Step 2: Over-engineer the problem

The title kind of gives it away but, yeah, I did a thing.

I wanted to get something that fixes all the problems above. Solid, no glue, built-in way of joining the sides together and slightly smaller holes.

For the side, it was fairly easy from the start, I just added a dovetail that you can force together. It’s really solid.

I thought that making a “clip-on” mechanism would be really cool. You just build it up and hear the satisfying “click” while you’re building it. It’s so simple and so cool!

Also, increase the thickness of the sides.

Sadly, it wasn’t that simple. The clips sounded  cool, a nice “click”, but sadly it had too much space and was wiggling around a lot.

The other bad part is that building it and removing shelves at will was actually more annoying than I expected.

Ok so, lesson learned. No clips.

Also, the last floor doesn’t hold paint. So I made a quick fix just to get them to work, but it was a bad idea. Oh well.

Step 3: KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid

I had plenty of other ideas for the lock-in of the shelves and the whole structure. I even thought at some point and pre-designed something for a screw-like mechanism.

Then it struck me.

All those stairs-like structures I see everywhere are all slide-in!

So I started designing.

Not only is building it so much easier, but also we have now a whole shelf at the very bottom level to hold all the paints!

Iterations, progress.
Love to see it in action.

Also I did a bit of work on the handle to get a clip-on mechanism (don’t say it) to make sure it stays in place. It’s cool and it works.

Conclusion

As any designer, I always think that my design has flaws I could fix. However I can say that I’m very happy with the result and now, instead of having cardboard boxes eating all my space, I have this (Yes, you can see all the iterations in a single screen):

Definitely does look nicer than the cardboard version and gives me way more space.

Maybe one day I’ll replace all the old versions with the new ones… but I kind of like having them on display. As a testimony of my design’s improvement.

If you want to have your own Vertical Compact Paint Rack, you can buy it here!

All the instructions to build it are available at this link, it’s fairly easy and straightforward.