Canadian Paint Options

Sorry, it's a bit blurry

This is all I can find at the shops near my place. Well there are lot's of paints for wood and metal but not many for plastics. I decided to go for these two first. Each is about 7 bucks. Pricey!

I took the gloss black because I'm planning on doing metallics later. I picked up the grey primer just to see how it compares to the Japanese stuff I'm used to using.

I couldn't find a place that sold Japanese primer (or any type for that matter) in a bottle for airbrushing so I'm trying this for now.

Both are enamels. I'm not so happy about that. I tried the grey out already and it smells bad (toxic so it actually smells kind of good but it's bad for you!).

Also it takes a lot longer to dry. And I'm worried that it might damage the plastic as in making it too soft and too easy to break.

We'll see. I plan on spraying enamel on it again. Man... it's funny. Enamel is what I'm trying to get away from but it seems that's all I can get here.  I knew I had it good in Japan!

Plus a lot of paints don't even say if it's acrylic or lacquer or enamel or what. Pain in the butt. I might try some of the acrylic bottles I saw and thin them down with water. I'm really trying to stay as non- toxic as I can but... I don't want to just waste the stuff I have so I'm going to try and use as much as I can before buying new stuff.

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Side note: Yesterday I cleaned up the garage and got it set up as my new paint station. I primed on panel using the Testors can show here and then sprayed a different panel with acrylic paint. No primer there. Pics to come.

You may be asking what kit am I working on? I will also reveal that later. Sorry kind of jumping around a bit.

MGIJ WIP 1 - Mr. Hobby Surfacer vs. Tamiya Primer

Specifically, Mr. Hobby "Mr. White Surfacer 1000" vs. Tamiya "Fine Surface Primer (L)"

White vs. Grey essentially, but it's not really that simple.

Take a look at the pics. You can probably see the differences for yourself. Same colour pieces, same basic spraying pattern.

My Tamiya gray ran out so I decided to finish the other parts with the Mr. Hobby Surfacer.

As you can see the gray really goes on thicker and provides more of a flat texture. The white gives it a slight shine and doesn't go on as thick. Not so good for what I'm trying to do here which is recolour the pink to black.

Yes I'm going from pink to black so technically I should be fine with just spraying the black on straight away but it doesn't work that way in practice.

If you look at the piece sprayed in white, you can see that the edges are still quite pink.

This is why modelers use the "C-men technique". A technique I may be forced to employ. I realize now that I didn't have this problem on my Sinanju because of all the curves in the armour. All the straight lines on the Infinite Justice might cause a problem when I'm trying to do a recolour like this. I don't want a trace of pink to show anywhere when I'm done.

I'm even repainting the beam effect parts. I used the white surfacer on those originally but the result was less than satisfactory so I sprayed again with the gray primer and I was pleased.

The problem now is that I have a lot more pink parts to paint and no more gray. I'm going to use up the rest of my white primer just because I'm trying to go through all my cans and move onto smaller bottles to use in my airbrush from now on.

Another problem with the white primer is the potential for over spray and having it pool up along edges as shown here.

For some reason the Tamiya gray primer is much more forgiving of over spray. You can barely notice it when it happens and you have to be spraying pretty hard and pretty close to get it to happen. Basically you have to be trying to get it like that. Either that or you're spraying completely wrong.

I'm going to trying doing my recolour job on legs first to see what's in store for the rest of this build.

I'm under the impression that this is going to be a bit more challenging than I'm expecting it to be.