Dave's Guide To Painting Decoys (and other TF toys) Well, I've been getting asked questions here and there for a while on the whole decoy-painting business, so I figured I'd finally get around to writing a file that covered everything useful I could think of. Most of this concerns painting decoys, but there's some pointers on regular toys as well. 1.0 TYPES OF PAINT While using Testors enamel might give you a more durable coat, the stuff is a royal pain to work with. Not to mention that while decoys can bend, a coat of enamel generally won't. CRACK. Thus, for painting decoys, I strongly recommend some variety of acrylic paint. Acrylics are water-soluble for easy cleanup and lack of dangerous fumes. They dry enough to touch within a few minutes, and enough to paint over even faster (especially the flat colors). There's two basic kinds of acrylic paint, enamel and regular. 1.1 Acrylic Enamels What the "enamel" means in this case is that the paint will dry to an even coat, leaving less brushstrokes behind. Acrylic enamels are more likely to bead, which helps them dry evenly but can be a royal pain if you try to paint over a spraycoat base. Most of my acrylic enamels are Pactra's paint sets, of which I know of four different sets out there. There's the household paints, a basic color set which should get your through your first few sets okay, although it has a dark blue instead of normal blue. It has two blacks and two whites, flat and gloss of each (see below). The other three sets are Car Detail (which has a good blue, as well as orange and pink), Airplane Set (lots of greys, plus gunmetal and a flat red) and Ship Set (which I don't have, but it has more greys and some browns). They sell for anywhere from $5.39 (K-Mart) to $7.99 (Toys R Us) for a set and come with three brushes, of which you'll only ever use the smallest for decoys. I've also found much larger pots of acrylic enamel in one of the campus area bookstores, but they tend to have more paint than you'll ever use in painting decoys. 1.1.1 Gloss Acrylic Enamels Gloss acrylic enamels are tricky to work with for a couple of reasons. First, it's a lot harder to tell when they're dry, which is why I tend to use the flat blacks instead (since they gloss up under the spray coating anyway). Second, and this seems to be more of a problem with the Autobot decoys than the Decepticon ones, they soak into the plastic a little and are gummy to the touch for a long time. You have to be more ginger when holding a decoy by a gloss-painted part, since it'll slough off easily in the early stages. 1.1.2 Flat Acrylic Enamels At the moment, I only have three colors to judge by in Pactra's flat acrylic enamels. White, black and red. White tends to be runny and not cover very well, so I leave it as a mixing color. Black is great, sealing the part in a rubbery shell within minutes. Unfortunately, it does tend to crack as it contracts while drying, you may have to paint more detailed parts twice. Red is very good for detail, being much less runny than the gloss red, but it does look somewhat dull. 1.2 Regular Acrylics To supplement my Pactras, I've picked up a half dozen jars of Ral Partha miniatures paint, available at about two dollars or less per jar in most hobby shops. I got white and yellow for better coverage, since regular acrylics tend to be thicker and less likely to bead than enamels. I also use the yellow mixed with a little Pactra green for Constructicon color. The white, unfortunately, is not very flexible and cracks easily, so is better used as a basecoat and then painted over with any white you need. It does, however, make a good basecoat. Two more jars are my metallics, silver and gold. These work very much like the acrylic enamels, and give good coverage overall. Additionally, the silver particles are fairly large, so mixing even a little silver paint with another color will give you a nice metallic sheen (see, for example, the Shockwave or Reflector decoys). The last one I use on decoys is purple, mainly bought for Decepticon insignias and Shockwave. It's a tad goopy, so you have to be careful. Overall, non-enamel acrylics are thicker, which has plusses and minuses. They also usually show more brush strokes, which can make the final result look sort of bad. 1.3 Other Stuff For fine detail line work, such as the 26 on Mirage's chest, I use a .25mm nib technical pen pulled from my drawing set. These are kind of expensive, though. I got a nice disposable one for $6. Sometimes you'll find you need a color not found in any set, like the Constructicon Green or Mirage's odd blue. The Pactra sets have nice mixing bowls in the tray, and if you need more than a little of the color I'd recommend making a full bowl's worth and working FAST. Few things are quite so frustrating as finding a missed spot the next day and having to try and exactly match the shade of your new color to patch it. Adding some water to what's left in the bowl will generally leave you with at least a few pins (see below) worth of usable paint the next day. While this will probably not come up with decoys, you may want to build new pieces for a repainting project. While full-scale kitbashing is beyond the scope of this article (and beyond my skills), there's a few things you can do to add details. Legos (TM) are a great source of material, especially on the toys themselves. Hobby shops often have pieces of plastic sheets and conduits you can cut up and glue together for parts (see, for example, the Jetfire thrusters I made). And I've found that mounting putty (fun tack, etc) is good for fashioning small surface details out of, since it's flexible and will stick to the surface on its own. In all kitbashing situations, of course, glue before painting. Otherwise you're gluing to a thin layer of paint, and the pieces will fall off. 2.0 PAINTING IMPLEMENTS As mentioned above, the Pactra sets come with some brushes, but even the smallest of these is really only recommended for large scale work when you're painting a decoy. You can get better detail brushes at hobby stores or in the modeling sections of some toy/department stores, usually at about $3 a pop. It's important when using detail brushes that you keep a container of water nearby and frequently wash out the brush. If you don't, paint will get up into the base of the brush and dry, forcing the bristles apart. And there is no way to get rid of this paint once it gets in there. With a good brush and the flexible nature of decoys, you should be able to get at every part of the decoy you need to paint. If you're careful you can even paint facial detail with a brush. At a level between the cheap brush and the easily-fouled brush are a couple of oddball painting implements I've found useful. My first attempt at a non-brush method was the end of a copper wire (see below for more uses for copper wire). This allowed for delivery of a small blob of paint to a location, as well as (if you're really careful) some limited fine detail work. Recently I've started using a pin to paint with, taken from my sewing kit (one with a large plastic head, more comfortable to work with). The paint will bead just behind the point, so just touching the point to the surface will usually get you nowhere. You have to lay it a little sideways to get the paint touching the surface, then you can drag the paint around with the tip for fine detail. This does, however, mean you can't really do anything really small with a pin unless it's recessed a little (or you push the pin into the rubber). But it does let you get great control right up to the boundary between colors. By laying the pin fully sideways, you can get a miniature roller of sorts going, covering larger areas without leaving brushstrokes. And best of all, the pin will never get fouled...just wipe or scrape the paint off with a napkin. Very easy to clean, and great for times when you're doing final touchups and want to switch quickly between colors. 3.0 COATING One disadvantage of all acrylic paints is that they're a bit fragile. You can compensate for this by spraying the finished product with a layer of clearcoat or matte fixative spray. Once this dries all the way (it dries enough to touch in about 15 minutes, but takes several hours to hard dry) it's a fairly durable shell. Unfortunately, it's not durable enough to prevent paint from being rubbed off at joints and other transformation contact points. So if you paint a Transformer you'll need to either figure out which areas to leave clear, or resign yourself to never transforming the repainted toy again. I'm not sure if non-acrylic model paints are strong enough to withstand it, although I'm reasonably confident that automobile paint will do the trick (someone who was displaying painted war machine minis at Origins had used Ford automotive paint on some Eldar Titans). You also need to compensate for the thickness of the paint itself, especially if painting in a color like white which needs several coats. Now, here's the fun part. If you stand your decoys on newspaper or aluminum foil and then spray them (assuming they don't keel over), you end up with decoys stuck to the surface. The paint layer sticks far better to the coating than to the decoy. The trick I use to avoid this is to hang the decoy by some copper wire (light gauge) under an armpit. I also spray the wire with a bit of WD-40 to keep it from sticking to the armpit, but that doesn't always work. This way, most of the decoy is open to the air, and you can spin it around to spray it completely. And if the wire sticks to the armpit, you can do a quick touchup job. Since the armpit doesn't really need a protective coating (and the feet do), this works great. Pretty much anything you paint can be hung from some harmless point with wire and sprayed safely, although with GoBot pieces you may need to attach the pieces to the wire with mounting putty. One thing about the coating, unfortunately, is that it does seal so well. If you have to paint over the coating, the paint will start to bead since it can't soak into the rubber. This is more of a problem with acrylic enamels, as mentioned above. So be very sure you're done before spraying this stuff on. 4.0 DRYING TIME Some of the paints will dry fast enough that you can just hold the decoy while it dries. And when painting anything but the feet, you can just let it stand there to dry. But sometimes you need to paint the feet and can't hold onto some other part while they dry. For decoys, the same copper wire trick for the coating process works most of the time here. For example, when doing a full body basecoat of some color (like Constructicon Green), I wrap some wire around a part I know doesn't need the basecoat, usually a gun. Then when I'm done I can just hang the decoy up to dry for a while. For GoBot pieces, I make heavy use of mounting putty, straws and bent paperclips. Pieces with screwholes can be mounted on puttied clips through the hole to dry, and as a stand for painting without touching the toy. Parts that won't work this way, like arms, I hang with wire (in the case of the arms, I usually thread the wire through the fist). 5.0 PAINT REMOVAL With decoys, you can usually just get by with painting over a mistake. But if you're repainting another toy, you'll probably want to remove any flaking paint before you start, or the new paint will flake off when the old does. Most paint used on Transformers is soluble in acetone. Unfortunately, so are most Transformers. So, unless you're really careful or find no other way around it, I'd recommend not using chemical solvents. My Jazz GoBot is still kind of gummy-looking in places where the acetone started to dissolve it. A great paint-remover for brittle paint like that used in the ActionMasters is a small Phillips head screwdriver, like the one you used to take the thing apart in the first place. Applied correctly, it will easily remove most of the offending paint without damaging the plastic underneath. A pocketknife or razor will remove the remaining stubborn bits. I hope this file will help those of you out there looking to do a little customization (and are trying to steal the decoys that are rightfully mine to do it...MINE I TELL YOU! MUAHAHAHAHA! Ahem.). Dave Van Domelen, has little spots of paint on all his pants now....