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The Best Paint Racks for Citadel Pots and Dropper Bottles (2026)

Pot shape decides the rack - here is how to choose one

The Best Paint Racks for Citadel Pots and Dropper Bottles (2026)

A paint rack is the least exciting thing you will buy for this hobby and the one that changes your painting the most, because a colour you cannot see is a colour you do not use. Painters with a hundred pots in a shoebox use about twelve of them. The buying question is duller than the internet makes it sound - what shape are your pots, how many will you have in two years, and does the rack go on the desk, on the wall or in a drawer. Everything on this page is priced across the shops we track on our paint rack shelf.

The one spec that decides everything: pot shape

Nearly every rack sold is cut for one bore size, and the two common ones are not close.

  • Citadel flip-top pots are squat and wide - a fat cylinder with a hinged lid that needs clearance to swing open. Bandua size their racks by that diameter and call the format P36: roughly 36mm across.
  • Vallejo-style dropper bottles - Vallejo, Army Painter Warpaints, Green Stuff World, Two Thin Coats and most of the rest - are narrow and tall. Bandua call that format P26, and Green Stuff World's dropper carry case quotes a maximum of 25mm by 78mm per bottle.

So a rack cut for droppers will not take a Citadel pot at all, and a rack cut for Citadel pots holds droppers loosely - they wobble, they lean, and a knocked shelf becomes a domino run. This is the single most common buying mistake on this shelf, and it is unfixable after the fact because these racks arrive as flat-pack MDF with the holes already lasered.

Green Stuff World make the problem unusually visible in their own catalogue. Their Portable Paint Station ships with a foam shelf drilled for fifty 17/18ml dropper bottles, and if you paint with Citadel you buy the wide-pot foam insert separately - a different insert, same station, because the pots do not fit the standard one.

If you buy with pots in mind, the racks that say so on the tin are:

And the dropper equivalents, for contrast: the TTCombat & Vallejo Paint Rack 36, the Bandua Lesmes 54 (which lays droppers down horizontally, so you read the label rather than the cap), and Green Stuff World's Modular Paint Rack Vertical 17ml, with a 30ml sibling and a 60ml one for dipping inks and the big bottles.

Mixed collections are normal, and they are catered for. Bandua's Fidalgo Small Pack mixes Vallejo and Citadel bores across five modules deliberately; their Rochela Mixed studio carries 24 pots at 36mm and 40 at 26mm in one box; and the Artai is a tall rack built for mixed pot sizes with tool hooks and a ten-brush stand on it. If you own both formats, buy for both from the start rather than buying twice.

Wall, desktop or drawer

Desktop is what most people want and should probably buy first. A stepped or tiered rack sat at the back of the desk puts every colour within arm's reach and takes no fixings, no landlord permission and no commitment. Green Stuff World's Front module is the classic tiered display, up to 46 pots deep; the TTCombat 25 is the small, cheap version of the same idea; and Bandua's Zel takes about 60 with a larger 120-paint version when it outgrows itself. The cost is desk area, which is the thing you have least of.

Wall-mounted is the answer once the desk is full. A wall rack is a single layer deep, so nothing hides behind anything, and it gives you the desk back. TTCombat's Citadel Mega Paint Rack 72 is a straightforward 11.5 by 19 inch board for 72 Citadel or Tamiya pots. Vallejo make their own wall-mounted display for 17ml droppers and a 35/60ml version for the larger bottles. Two warnings: fix into something solid, because a full rack is heavy in a way an empty one does not suggest, and keep it off a wall in direct sun - acrylic paint does not enjoy UV or a radiator.

Drawers are for everything that is not paint, and for paint you want in the dark. Green Stuff World's 30-drawer MDF cabinet and its 16-drawer sibling swallow bits, transfers, pigments and half-used sprues, which are the things that actually make a desk unusable. Their stacking system does the same in modules - three or five horizontal drawers with dividers, or four vertical ones with acrylic fronts so you can see what is in them. Kraken's Black Rack range covers the same ground with a six-drawer cabinet and a three-long-drawer wardrobe.

Portable is a fourth category worth knowing about if you paint at a club, on a kitchen table you have to clear, or on holiday: Bandua's Rochela studios (P36 for Citadel pots, P26 for droppers) and Green Stuff World's Portable Paint Station fold the whole setup into something you can carry. If it is the models you need to move rather than the paints, that is a different product with a different foam question - see our carry case guide.

Corners are the free space

The back corner of a desk is dead area in every setup, and it is where the cheapest capacity you will ever buy lives. Green Stuff World cut two shapes for it: a 45-degree wedge that turns a run of racks around a corner and holds 11 pots doing it, and a right-angle straight corner that holds 30. They also do an open corner shelf unit and a three-drawer corner module for the same footprint.

Kraken's system has a corner unit with drawers plus corner colour-shelf tops cut for Citadel pots, droppers or pigment jars. Bandua's Fidalgo Large Pack includes two swivel corner units among its eight modules. Kromlech build corners into their range too, with an ending corner set and a low corner module for the low rack.

Capacity: buy for the collection you will have

Count your pots. Then buy for half as many again, because every painter underestimates and because a rack you have outgrown is a rack that has stopped working - the overflow ends up back in the box it came from.

The real decision here is modular or fixed. A modular system - Green Stuff World's magnetised stackables, Kraken's Black Rack, Bandua's Fidalgo, Kromlech's rack sets - costs more per slot and survives the collection growing, because you buy another module rather than another rack. A fixed rack is cheaper per pot and is the right answer if you genuinely know the collection has stopped growing. Most people who think it has are wrong, but a single TTCombat 50 or Bandua Zel is a perfectly sensible purchase and a fraction of the outlay.

One more thing modular systems buy you: the non-paint modules. Once you own the frame you can drop in a spray can rack, a marker organiser, a tool module or a tablet holder for the tutorial you are following.

MDF, acrylic and 3D prints

MDF is what almost everything on this shelf is made of, and for good reason. Laser cutting is cheap and exact, so the holes fit the pot properly; it is rigid; and it is by far the lowest cost per slot. It arrives flat-packed and you assemble it - most are push-fit and glue-free, some want a little wood glue, and a couple of the bigger cabinets are a genuine evening's work. Bare MDF is thirsty, so wipe spills quickly; several ranges, including Green Stuff World's, sell the same modules in a black finish which hides the marks and looks considerably better in a photo.

Acrylic is the smaller category and it does one thing MDF cannot: you see the paint. Green Stuff World's clear 17ml display tray holds sixty pots in a wipe-clean slab with no assembly at all, with 30ml and 60ml versions. It scratches where MDF dents, and it costs more.

3D-printed racks are the third route, and we will be straight with you: no shop we track lists one, so there is nothing here for us to price. The appeal is real - a printed rack can be cut to your exact bottle, and the STL files for common pot formats are everywhere - but it is a maker-community purchase, and the honest advice is that unless you already own a printer it will cost more than the MDF and fit no better.

Organising what goes in it

Two systems, and the argument between them is older than the hobby.

By range and number is how the pot is labelled and how every painting guide is written. Citadel's own naming groups its steps - a Base, its Layer, its Shade - and Vallejo, AK and Green Stuff World all number their bottles, so a rack in range order means a recipe that says "71.080" is found in three seconds. This is the right default, especially if you follow schemes and guides, and it is the only system that survives someone else using your desk.

By colour wheel groups reds with reds and blues with blues regardless of maker. It is much better for choosing - you can see every green you own at once, which is exactly the moment you realise you have eleven and need none - and much worse for finding a named paint. It is the system to use if you mix a lot, paint from imagination rather than from recipes, or own several ranges that overlap.

The practical compromise most experienced painters land on is hybrid: colour-wheel order on the desktop rack, where you are choosing; range order on the wall or the back rows, where you are retrieving. A third shelf worth having is a small "current project" stand - Kraken's little Citadel paint stand or dropper stand holds the dozen colours a scheme actually uses next to your hand, which is where the time goes.

Whatever you choose, put shades and technical paints together in their own block. They are used differently, they are used often, and they are the pots you hunt for.

Tips

  • Check the bore before you check the price. A rack cut for droppers will not take a Citadel pot, and flat-pack MDF cannot be re-drilled.
  • Buy for half again as many paints as you own. Everyone underestimates, and an overflowing rack has stopped doing its job.
  • Corners are free capacity - a wedge or right-angle module holds real numbers in space you were not using.
  • Keep paint out of direct sunlight and off radiator walls, whichever rack you mount.
  • Store shades and technicals as their own block. They are used more often than any single colour.
  • Modular if the collection is growing, fixed if it genuinely is not. Per slot, the fixed rack always wins - right up to the day you buy a second one.

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