Serpent Custom 4 - Painting begins
As mentioned, I'll be handpainting this 1/100 serpent custom. Today beings that process! With a thunderstorm this evening I wont be able to prime more, but thats fine. A nice shipment of more kits arrived, so I can start one of those in any downtime!
I'm not sponsored, but I included the Newtype sticker because they had a good site, good selection, good deals, and things got to me pretty quickly. I did do a lot of shopping around first, so I'll probably put up a post on my findings from that at some point, as several stores were just as worth looking at depending on who had what in stock and the amount and cost/kit of stuff you were buying.
Anyways, back to the serpent! Fun fact, this serpent is old enough to enjoy a nice drink after work (the dials indicate the month and year the sprue was produced).
We last left off with the first few steps, the legs and torso, of the kit primed. Well now we're going to print off a copy of that design we did, to know what pieces get what colors, and get to work! We'll do the black in a bit, that will be easy over black primer. lets start on these camo pieces! First, a reminder of the scheme:
So to do the digital camo, we'll first start with a very light sky blue. Then we'll add some tape to mask off clean lines, and do the medium blue, and then the dark blue. Its always easier to build dark over light, so thats the reason for the order. If i was going for a PERFECT display model I'd probably so a lot of assembly first, then fill in any gaps and file back down and joint seams to get it perfect, then just disassemble it back down to some subassemblies for painting, masking off polycaps with tape or putty. For now, though, as this is a high grade meant mainly to test painting on gundams, I'm going to just paint the pieces then assemble so I dont have to worry about making sure paint doesn't get on parts of the assembly it shouldn't. So first, to the paint case for the light light blue.
And dont forget the thinner, either! I should really have a retarding medium for large area work like this as well, to make sure everything dries slowly and evenly, but I'm out. I'll have to rectify that, but for now this will do. Once we get some of that paint thinned with just enough thinner to make it the consistency of whole (not skim) milk, we get it on our wet palette (basically just a wet sponge with some parchment paper on it, which will keep our paint from drying out too fast). Then it's time to select a brush. I decided to go with a number 6 flat synthetic brush. The size is about right for the detail, flat to help with large area painting, and large area and acrylic painting can both be rough on natural brushes, and natural is expensive, so synthetic it is.
The first coat may have been thinned just a tad too much, but thats easy to correct and better than too thick. And a light color will always show brush strokes and the dark color behind on the first pass - thats fine, we were planning on doing plenty of coats to get a nice base.
and dont worry, I'm keeping my brush wet!
Acrylics dry out fast in the brush, so swirling in water regularly helps keep any from drying, and dried acrylic is bad for the brush and your paint job! The paint dries pretty quick(10-20 minutes, maybe a tad longer in some cases), so by the time I finish a coat on all the pieces i'm doing (about 10), I could probably go back and do the first again. But one of the easiest ways to ruin a paint job is to try and paint over semi dried paint - wet paint will still blend, dry paint will accept a new coat, but semi dried paint will pull up and create tears in the paint job! I'd rather wait a little between jobs, and nows a good time to open the guntank and get started on that (click here for that post). Its a nice simple model, though I am not in love with its color scheme, so I may paint it next, we'll see. But back to our painting. A few more coats after finding the right thinner to paint ratio and things are looking good. A nice sky blue paint job starts to firm up layer by layer, and the brush strokes start to fade away, then disappear.
I will say the paint drying over such a large area looked a little funny at first - it didn't dry evenly, so first you saw some parts look dry and some still wet, and some way more blue, while others more the milky white of the thinner drying off. I resisted the urge to touch any of this while it was drying - once I put down an even coat, I let it dry no matter how funny the intermediary steps looked, and I think that definitely helped. I've totally ruined paint jobs before trying to adjust them while drying when nothing was wrong, it was just how the paint looked going through the drying process.
Instead I just walked over to the couch where I had a little tray set up and worked on the guntank a bit. I closed the top of the wet palette after ensuring the sponge still had water to keep the paint fresh, and did some assembly work there I'll detail in another post. Worked great, and kept me from trying to repaint it again too soon.
Anyways, that blue is what I want as the base, so next I'll have to work on taping off clean lines for the digi camo. Wish me luck!
I'm not sponsored, but I included the Newtype sticker because they had a good site, good selection, good deals, and things got to me pretty quickly. I did do a lot of shopping around first, so I'll probably put up a post on my findings from that at some point, as several stores were just as worth looking at depending on who had what in stock and the amount and cost/kit of stuff you were buying.
Anyways, back to the serpent! Fun fact, this serpent is old enough to enjoy a nice drink after work (the dials indicate the month and year the sprue was produced).
We last left off with the first few steps, the legs and torso, of the kit primed. Well now we're going to print off a copy of that design we did, to know what pieces get what colors, and get to work! We'll do the black in a bit, that will be easy over black primer. lets start on these camo pieces! First, a reminder of the scheme:
So to do the digital camo, we'll first start with a very light sky blue. Then we'll add some tape to mask off clean lines, and do the medium blue, and then the dark blue. Its always easier to build dark over light, so thats the reason for the order. If i was going for a PERFECT display model I'd probably so a lot of assembly first, then fill in any gaps and file back down and joint seams to get it perfect, then just disassemble it back down to some subassemblies for painting, masking off polycaps with tape or putty. For now, though, as this is a high grade meant mainly to test painting on gundams, I'm going to just paint the pieces then assemble so I dont have to worry about making sure paint doesn't get on parts of the assembly it shouldn't. So first, to the paint case for the light light blue.
And dont forget the thinner, either! I should really have a retarding medium for large area work like this as well, to make sure everything dries slowly and evenly, but I'm out. I'll have to rectify that, but for now this will do. Once we get some of that paint thinned with just enough thinner to make it the consistency of whole (not skim) milk, we get it on our wet palette (basically just a wet sponge with some parchment paper on it, which will keep our paint from drying out too fast). Then it's time to select a brush. I decided to go with a number 6 flat synthetic brush. The size is about right for the detail, flat to help with large area painting, and large area and acrylic painting can both be rough on natural brushes, and natural is expensive, so synthetic it is.
The first coat may have been thinned just a tad too much, but thats easy to correct and better than too thick. And a light color will always show brush strokes and the dark color behind on the first pass - thats fine, we were planning on doing plenty of coats to get a nice base.
and dont worry, I'm keeping my brush wet!
Acrylics dry out fast in the brush, so swirling in water regularly helps keep any from drying, and dried acrylic is bad for the brush and your paint job! The paint dries pretty quick(10-20 minutes, maybe a tad longer in some cases), so by the time I finish a coat on all the pieces i'm doing (about 10), I could probably go back and do the first again. But one of the easiest ways to ruin a paint job is to try and paint over semi dried paint - wet paint will still blend, dry paint will accept a new coat, but semi dried paint will pull up and create tears in the paint job! I'd rather wait a little between jobs, and nows a good time to open the guntank and get started on that (click here for that post). Its a nice simple model, though I am not in love with its color scheme, so I may paint it next, we'll see. But back to our painting. A few more coats after finding the right thinner to paint ratio and things are looking good. A nice sky blue paint job starts to firm up layer by layer, and the brush strokes start to fade away, then disappear.
I will say the paint drying over such a large area looked a little funny at first - it didn't dry evenly, so first you saw some parts look dry and some still wet, and some way more blue, while others more the milky white of the thinner drying off. I resisted the urge to touch any of this while it was drying - once I put down an even coat, I let it dry no matter how funny the intermediary steps looked, and I think that definitely helped. I've totally ruined paint jobs before trying to adjust them while drying when nothing was wrong, it was just how the paint looked going through the drying process.
Instead I just walked over to the couch where I had a little tray set up and worked on the guntank a bit. I closed the top of the wet palette after ensuring the sponge still had water to keep the paint fresh, and did some assembly work there I'll detail in another post. Worked great, and kept me from trying to repaint it again too soon.
Anyways, that blue is what I want as the base, so next I'll have to work on taping off clean lines for the digi camo. Wish me luck!
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