 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video. Today, we're not going to talk about paint or painting techniques, we're going to talk about the hobby space. The place where you sit down to get the paint on miniatures, and I'm going to talk about how we set you up for success with your space. Let's get into it. Uh, the strict techno-mancer that is Vinci Vee. Let us get into the technique and learn it Vinci Vee style. My hobby space is something I take very seriously. It's something that I've evolved and grown over time. And today I want to share with you the components of my particular hobby space, and how I think you should translate those. What's important, what's not important. Because realistically, a quality hobby space, if you can have it, if you've got the luxury, which not all of us do, to have a space dedicated to painting, will make you paint more. The more you have a space that is just set up to be comfortable, to be ready, where you can launch yourself into the act of painting without getting stuff out, without going through any kind of precursor, means it's more likely you'll sit down and paint. So if you happen to have even a small amount of space in your house or your apartment or wherever you happen to live, uh, your space station that you're circling the planet with, if you're watching this very far in the future, I assume that's well, I'll just be living in weird, um, rotating space stations, right? Uh, wherever you happen to be, this is how I have set up my space. And I hope from it, you can extract some own ideas for your hobby space. The first and most important aspect of your hobby space, and this might sound insane, but it's your chair. So it's not the desk or the paints or the miniatures or anything like that. It's the chair. My chair is an older Herman Miller Aeron chair. I really like it. Um, I got it several, I guess years ago now, uh, but it's important. If you are going to invest in anything for your hobby before you invest in another army, before you invest in, uh, anything expensive, whatever that might be, the newest paint range that's out on the market, buy yourself a good chair. Good chairs do cost a significant amount of money. You want one that allows you to sit at a very straight back 90 degree angle with your legs. In other words, your legs are flat on the ground. They come up, your knees create a 90 degree angle to your waist, which makes a 90 degree angle to your back as I'm sitting now talking to you. I also have this extra little thing in my chair that helps me sit in the proper posture. I find it really helps, but a good chair with good back support and adjustable height is very important. You want to make sure you're not sitting too low. You're not slouched. You're not leaning forward or hunched or put in an unusual stress position. It's well known that I paint for many, many, many hours a week. And one of the ways I do this, the way I can sit down and paint for eight hours, 10 hours, 12 hours at a time, I mean, I do get up and use the restroom and walk around for two or three minutes every hour or so. It's important to do that. But one of the ways I do that is by having a good chair that doesn't put me in a stress position as I paint. These usually are going to cost you at minimum a couple of hundred dollars here in the U.S. And they can go up to nearly a thousand. So this is a major investment. I'm aware of this. But I would tell you that if you are concerned about your back and about your overall health, this is one of the better investments you can make. You don't need to go crazy. You don't need some $2,000 magic chair. Just a good solid chair with back support where you can adjust the height. Something that's actually made with that proper amount of lumbar support. Keep your butt in place and comfortable for a long time will help you keep painting. Now let's talk about the desk. So my hobby desk is really just also my work desk and my editing desk and everything. I kind of just do everything from this desk. It's where I live. I'm sure it's where I'll die. On the desk, I of course have a big cutting mat. This is something I would recommend. Keeps helping. It helps you keep painting off your desk and helps you make sure that you're not making a general mess of things when you're scraping and sanding and stuff like that. It's much easier to dust off than getting that crap everywhere. But I want to talk about a couple of elements of my desk. The desk itself, you really don't need anything larger than sort of a three foot by three foot size desk. That sort of thing will work just fine. It's even if you only have a very small space or a corner in an apartment, you can still make it work. Something that you can slide your legs underneath and work on top of. You're good to go. Aside from things like the cutting mat or stuff like that, my desk is organized. So I have all the things I'll need easily at hand. What does this mean? It means my wet palette has a space here. My brushes have a space here. And the paints I'm currently utilizing have a space here. I cannot recommend enough organization of your hobby space. And I know this is anathema to some people. Some people just love living in chaos. However, most of the time that has been shown to make you less productive and generally less efficient at what you're doing, organization is generally pretty important. That's why society is an organized thing and not a bunch of us running around like lunatics constantly. So I organize my paints through these big nail polish racks. You can see that I have both stand up nail polish racks and wall mounted nail polish racks. Now I don't want to stand up and fish around every time I'm looking for any particular paint, even though they are organized by brand and then color. I want to have the paint I'm actively working with ready and within arms reach. As such, I have a smaller rack that sits directly on my desk that's here to be utilized for the current paints that are active in my project. Then as I need more paint on my wet palette or something like that, I can easily grab the paint I need, squeeze out a few drops, put it back. When the project is completed, whatever that happens to be, an individual figure, a whole force, an army, whatever, there's a cleanup step where all of that goes away. I also keep things that are sort of common sense near my desk, so that means things like a little squeezy bottle with water to clean out my airbrush, you know, varnish and thinner and all the other sort of accoutrement you might imagine that you need on a regular basis. All of those are within reach and again, in sort of an organized way where I can reach out my arm, grab them, bring them over, put them back. The more things you can easily keep at hand and sort of organize stacked shelving type things, the better you generally are going to be at being efficient and getting work done quickly. Let's talk about brushes. I actually store most of my brushes in a way that they tell you not to store your brushes, which is with the tip up in just a glass or something like that. But the reality is most of your brushes are synthetics or junk brushes or stuff like that and it doesn't matter. You can store them however you want. I do have this nice little MDF thing I had bought at Adapticon many years ago that allows me to store my brushes sideways and my current active high-quality sable brushes that I'm utilizing. I keep those in there as well as a couple other racks that I have for things like pens. That's what they're originally for. They're for like pens or pencils where they sit out. I keep some extra brushes in there as well. Your brushes that you're using once again, I keep the active brushes I'm using at hand on my desk on top of my wet palette. But once I'm done, after I'm cleaning up and putting the paint away, I also clean all of my brushes. Speaking of keeping things at hand, right next to my desk, I have these big sort of storage bins. That's where I keep things like basing material, tape, paper clips, glue, you know, just all the general nonsense that you're going to need when you're working, both creating, you know, from the initial part of putting the minis together out through finishing the base. It's sort of the bulk for everything I might need to use. So sand and tufts and dirt and rocks and all those things are in there. But I also have things like my brush cleaning soap, all the different types of glue that I might need, including extra bottles of it for the future. Tape in case I need to mask something off. All of those sorts of things, milliput, green stuff, these things all just exist in these bins again, close and at hand. One of the things you might notice here is that my hobby space is organized by impact of the more often I'm using it, the closer it is to me personally. And I would think I would encourage you to think about that deeply as you set up your hobby space. You want all of the things that you're going to actively and frequently interact with. So my my scalpel for scraping mold lines and stuff is kept very close at hand, right? My super glue thing is kept very close at hand. All of these things are there where I can just reach out, grab it and I don't have to move or stop or interrupt my flow. And I know that sounds like a minimal thing, but there's again, there's just a lot of research that humans are very bad at focus switching. We don't like to go from like one state to another, from one focus to another. So the more you can keep it so I'm dialed in, I'm focused, I'm working on my paint job and now I'm going to go over. I just need to boop, reach, grab this thing, do the work, put it back. The more you can do that, the more you can keep those regular things close at hand, the more you will just stay in the sort of zen state of painting, stick at the desk and keep working. If you allow yourself to sort of get up, walk around and go do these things other than when you're sort of standing up as you should every hour or two and walking around, if you're constantly having to do it, you will interrupt that flow and just stop painting. It's pretty much that easy. Now, my airbrush is adjacent to where I work. Basically, the airbrush booth, I slide my chair over to it. I keep all the airbrushes in the little trigger holsters as well as then everything for the airbrushing right there. Once again, organize the little bins that I have, have extra needles and nozzles and quick change tips and things like that. Anything that could break, I always keep at least one or two extra of those on hand, just so I can't be interrupted, stopped in the middle of a project and then be sunk. I can always switch out to the other version to the newer replacement part that I have and then keep working. Prior planning prevents poor performance is one of my absolute mottos in life. Let's talk about lighting. You've been seeing it in many of the shots here as I've been talking, but I wanted to end on lighting because I think it's absolutely one of the most important things. I have sort of accumulated all of these different lights over time and I have a bunch of them. The cheap lights that you see in the background that are sort of shining directly up and against the wall, those are there more to just create more light in the room, more diffuse ambient lighting. It's very valuable to have just a very bright space. Not only does it brighten your mood, but it also just helps bounce light all around the room, especially if you have white walls like I do and keeps the place bright and sort of evenly toned. You'll notice one of my lights is very warm. One is very cold. However, direct painting lights are also really important. You need to have a good, solid, bright light. Now, I actually have three here that sort of shine in different places over the desk where I'm working. These three lights create effectively enough light in the space for me to work. I have one that is sort of directly over top of me that's on a little bendy arm, one that's more rotating and is just and is more broad and cast a wider diffuse light over everything, and then one that's a little more distant. That's about lighting up the general space. OK, you don't need to have three lights. You need to have a good, solid painting light. What makes a good, solid painting light? You want something like an architect's drafting light. That's often a good place to look. Usually now they're in LEDs. You don't need to worry about can it switch and focus different like brightnesses and intensity. They usually will, but it doesn't actually matter very much. You want something that can get bright and as at five thousand K, that's the important part. That is a sort of daylight balanced middle of the road light. It's not too blue. It's not too yellow. In other words, either too cold or warm. That's your best bet for showing the true color and the true detail of your miniature. Try to get something that is adjustable where you can move it around. Oftentimes, I will need to readjust it depending on the size of the figure I'm working on or, you know, pull it forward or work at different angles, things like that. This drafting light, especially if it's on a little bendy arm like my one that's in front is, you can also choose to then use that to shoot your miniature when you're taking photos at the end. So that's pretty cool. You want a direct front on light for photos. Look for a video on photographing miniatures coming soon. I've learned a lot in the 300 videos since the last time I talked about this. But the lighting is really, really important. The other thing that's going to stop you from painting, we started on the chair, will end on the light. If your eyes are straining to see the detail, if your eyes aren't relaxed, then you will tire. It will mentally fatigue you. And as such, you will just get, you'll just stop painting. You'll get the urge to stop painting by flooding the area with nice bright light. Not only do you see the paint job better and render a higher quality paint job that's truer, but you also can paint longer without being fatigued either physically or mentally. So a good wide diffuse light, you don't want to shine a bright bulb directly onto your space. If you've got a bright bulb, something that's like big and is in one of the cheap sort of silver holders you buy for a couple of dollars at the hardware store, like I have lighting up my wall. In that case, you want to have some kind of paper or something over top of it to diffuse that light out. That's so important. I cannot stress this enough. The reason I like these architect drafting lights is they usually have some kind of covering on them to make the light more diffuse and spread out. You do not want a strong, direct lighting on your space. That will cast these strong, harsh shadows on your miniature and make it much harder to figure out what you're doing. From there, it's really just about seasoning to taste. You know, I have everything I need to listen to podcasts or listen to YouTube videos, which is often what I'm doing while I'm painting or editing or stuff like that. You know, just I have all the other creature comforts of life around me to make sure that I want to stay at the desk a good drink, a phone with a good podcast and a comfortable chair can go a long way to keeping you in the seat and keeping you painting. There you go. That's my hobby desk and my setup. I hope this was helpful to you. If it was, give it a like, subscribe for additional hobby cheating. We have new videos here every Saturday. If you've got any questions or anything like that about my hobby desk or my space or how I set it up or why I made the choices I did, drop those down in the comments below. I always answer every comment. If you want to support the channel, you can do so through the Patreon link down below. Don't forget, Uncle Adam and I through Snarling Badger Studios also have a new game out, Majestic 13. It's out and it's ready now. That joins our other two games, Space Station Zero and Rain and Hell. If you're a wargamer and you're interested in a cool near future experience where you're fighting aliens in a gritty battle for Earth, this might be the game for you. So check all that out down below. But as always, I thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time.