So in cars and model cars and gundams there is apparently a painting technique known as candy coating. It's an ultra shiny ultra luxe job with deep rich color and depth. Normally it is done via aerosol; in the gundam world usually that means airbrush altho I think I have seen some examples done entirely with rattlecans. The end result is very pretty; it's moody in some lighting, flashy in others, and deserves to be spun around real slow on a turntable, even if the thing that got painted is a 3,000 lbs automobile.
I dislike two things: using aerosols and people saying I can't do something. Airbrushing looks really fun, and I bet I'd like it both for models and for drawing but I just can't drum up the entusiasm for a machine you really need both a fume extractor and a face mask for if you're gonna use it frequently. People say you really need the airbrush to get a smooth enough coat of paint to get even OK results. I keep coming back to what makes paint level and going, "OK I think I have all I really need actually"
So the last couple of days I've been putting coats of paint on some spoons[1] to see what works and it's been some extremely pleasant playful experimenting... With some Quite Acceptable Results:
I am once again lamenting my inability to put video here; seeing these in motion really helps to show their depth. But even without it: pretty good for a first try yeah? This wasn't lacquers or otherwise organic solvent'd hobby paint. This wasn't even hobby paint for the pigments. Not only was this hand brushed, this was done with the dirt cheap materials I've been using:
Yes, you're reading the large bottle correctly: that is floor polish. I've mentioned this a couple times here, but it continues to tickle me: floor polish is a well-loved finish for modelers. It is also used in recipes for washes and glazes and thinners for acrylic 'cuz it's got a surfectant and other extras for self-leveling. The glazes bit is what got me really thinking down this trail: in a typical candy coat you do three layers before topcoating with high gloss: a black base, a metalic middle layer, and then layer after layer of what the gunpla builders all call "clear color"--a transparent medium with a bunch of pigment suspended in it. It is, in essence, a highly specialized glossy glaze. What is quickshine but a highly glossy transparent almost-medium?
I've loved this idea for a while since a) don't tell me what to do, surely I can brush paint an acrylic candy coat, b) I already have everything I need and c) what I have on hand is the junky cheap stuff that tickles my gremlin brain and keeps my compulsive hobby-of-hobbies from getting too out of hand. So this week at work[2] I've been using this experiment as my in-between-tasks cooldown. Paint dries while I work, paint is applied while I break. I'm really quite pleased. I've learned a bunch of new things about acrylic mediums, more on how this effect ticks, and build a list of more things to try.
Things I've learned:
- As great as quickshine is, it's really poor on the uptake of pigment: color likes to settle faster than I would like, leaving brush strokes of color inside the neatly leveled coat of polish. Solution? Use acrylic medium as a binder! I used 1:1 paint/matte medium.[3]
- When it comes to the metal mid layer, It is even more vitally imperative that must you must do this don't touch the paint after you brush it on. In general you really don't want to do this--it is THE reason you get paint strokes but in the case of metal medium thinned a little with floor polish you gotta be ultra sure your paint is dry before another coat or you will lift paint and it will Be Bad
- I probably don't need as many layers in the metal layer! I have been trying to get a Solidly metal suspension colored layer but I don't know if that's actually giving the amount of depth I'm aiming for. It's good but. it could be better.
- How textured or not textured the primer is doesn't really matter when there are this many layers of paint. How streaky the metal layer matters, but the primer and black? Not so much. I did some of these stippled for the primer and one of the black layers I put all the strokes perpendicular to every other stroke I made: neither made a difference.
I've already got list of things to try on my next three spoons. It is very fun to just noodle around and go "what if..." and "yes and..." and "ok but...". Puttering around is important, I think.
Knitting has swatches, drawing has scrap paper, woodworking has cheap and/or soft woods... Model makers have plastic spoons. They're roughly the size of the larger sections of a gundam limb, are dirt cheap, amd behave similarly enough ↩︎
yay days working from home ↩︎
I wonder about trying a satin or gloss medium, but I don't think it really matters? They're all transparent, and the gloss coat on top is overriding any tendency the mix has towards matte... which isn't a lot to begin with since the acrylic tubes and the polish are both gloss ↩︎