Welcome to the customizing community! I'm quite new myself, but I have some useful advice for you. Your creative spirit is pretty great and I can tell what you want to do. * With acrylic paints, you can often thin them with just a bit of water (30%) so it doesn't look blobby. Paint thinner does a better job depending on the paint, but you can make some pretty good paint jobs with water as a thinner as well. Folksart paints are pretty good. * Mask any especially intricate details you want to do. * If you want decals, custom waterslide decals can easily be ordered off of places like Etsy or even on these boards. * Disassembly is not required, but if you can, do it. Don't paint much on ball joints. G'luck, hope this helps!
Thanks for the info! Ive tried paint thinning before, but I kinda messed up on it, im gonna try doing it on my next custom. As for Disassembly and Masking, I do disassemble my figures before painting, but small mess-ups come from my EXTREMELY Shakey hands. :/ And I'll try masking next time!
I personally can't recommend Folksart for anything but dioramas. It has a very low pigment count and no durability at all, especially on plastic. If you want a really good, durable paint for figures, Vallejo Mecha paints are top notch. They're around $6 a bottle, but very much worth it. Also, when you can, prime the figure before painting. Paint over bare plastic rarely ever looks good as the paint is doing all the work of trying to adhere to the base. A primer gives it something to hold onto, and if you Prime and let it set for a while you're golden. We have loads of informative tutorials to look through that can greatly assist your customizing journey: Tutorials and How Tos
Excellent work on this! Something to bear in mind, depending on the acrylic paint it might chip easily, so you'll want to seal it somehow. Now I work on a budget usually, I typically use Apple Barrel even though I've heard it's not the best, but what I use to seal it is quick drying clear nail polish from Dollar Tree. The nail polish will add some thickness if you use to much. You'll also want to be careful that you don't use it across any transformation seems, because it will semi glue things together, at which point you'll have to carefully pry things apart.
If that's your first, that's pretty good. Overall, a nice Wheeljack. As you make more, you might want to look at stripping off the pain/clear coat before painting, and try using airbrush, spray paint for a more even coat. Overall you're off to a better start than I was when i started years ago...
Thank you! I use Craft smart paint from Michaels, and yes, it does chip quite a lot, so I only transform it for displaying.
