Cleaning up your hobby desk is the worst. You lose hobby time, it’s boring, and it gets messy again three days later. Time to declutter!
Declutter your Hobby Desk
To do this, we have a two-prong approach:
1- Be Gone
2- Stay Gone
To paraphrase words of wisdom from Denis Rodman: The best defense against a messy desk is offense.
1- Be Gone
The reason things get messy real quick is because everything is accessible, even if it shouldn’t be.Things you use once every 2 months stay on your desk “because I will need that real quick” or because ” let’s just do this now, it will take a second”. The mere thoughts of the sort is evil and should be treated as such.
Some things, like hardcore assembly tools, green stuff, sprues and bits don’t need to be at arms length all the time.
The same goes for basing materials, or terrain building supplies.
Or 460 different pots of paint for that matter.
Why the primer? Or the full set of oil paints? Or 3 water pots? This makes zero sense. All this stuff being there permanently pilled up as it is ignored most of the time.
So grab a big ass boxes and throw unceremoniously things in there.
You can divide in three or four different boxes with themes: Terrain, Assembly, Paint and Bits.
Not seventy five boxes; three of four. Five tops, if you have bazillion different airbrushes and doodads to go with them.
What to keep ? Only the basics:
- Assembly
- Hobby Knife
- Clippers
- Glue
Painting:
Paint brushes (Again, you don’t need the super big ones for terrain and the six half-destroyed brushes that you somehow keep)
Couple of paint pots relevant to your current project – You probably don’t need 54 shades of blue if you’re painting Poxwalkers.
Water Pot (not three of them)
Paper towel and a palette
Your compressor and an airbrush.
The. End.
But what about my…
But I can’t…
THE. END.
This minimalistic approach to keeping the bare minimum is abusing our laziness. If stuff is not easy to access, you’ll wait for a worthwhile occasion to take it out.
2- Stay Gone
Cycle through what you use between projects, don’t add stuff to the pile.
Now this seems rather intuitive, but it’s not. We’re all different levels of hoarders and the phrase ” I’ll need this for…” is never far in mind.
A great way to keep things in the Stay Gone category is to have dedicated space for everything that you want to stay on your desk at all times.
Get a really small organizer or pencil box for your hobby stuff, without a cover. This way, you can’t put every single thing you own in there and can’t use it to pile more stuff on top.
Same for your brush keeping. Maybe don’t have that large pint glass like mine and keep something much smaller that won’t fit 129 brushes in it.
These are just a few examples from my personal experience. You can make a note of the items that are always finding their way on your desk for no reason and figure out exactly how to keep them away.