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A good paint job is one of the keys to making a beautiful custom. While most other steps in creating a custom can be skipped for one reason or another for certain projects, almost all customs have some sort of paint job done to them.

Materials needed:

  • Acrylic paint
  • Paint brushes of various sizes
  • A cup, either disposable or expendable, filled with clean water
  • Paper towels
  • Paint palette
  • Eyedropper
  • Sealer (optional)
  • Airbrush (optional)
  • Low tack masking tape (optional)
  • Toothpicks (optional) (Be sure to read the note about this!)

The Don'ts of painting:

  • Do not use nail polish! This is not meant to be permanent and does interact well with the pony plastic. It often never cures properly, remaining tacky (as well as looking tacky!), and when it does cure, it will chip. Sometimes it will stain the plastic as well. Never, ever use it on ponies. It's for your nails only.
  • Do not use enamel paint. Be certain to get acrylic paint. Enamel paint will not cure on the vinyl of the ponies.
  • Do not use markers. Their stain usually spreads in the plastic and can sometimes even spread to other ponies if the one with marker touches them. Think of all the grungy old baits that have been destroyed by kids with things like markers. Don't do it to your custom!
  • Do not use spray paint. It will remain tacky.
  • Generally speaking, do not use oil paint. With some very careful preparation, it can work, but without that, the paint will remain tacky just like with enamels.
  • Don't use sealer without testing it first. Many of sealers, particularly those of the spray variety, remain tacky on pony plastic. Brush on ones may leave things like bubbles. Test it first so as to not destroy hours of hard work painting! I had to redo the whole body on Peridae because I didn't test first and while the head was fine, when I tried painting the sealer on the whole body, it wrecked it.
  • For the love of all that's holy, do not use toothpicks to paint detail work! It's amateur, usually looks terrible, does not provide any level of control in varying the thickness of your lines, and will greatly inhibit your growth as an artist. Good brushes do not come cheap. Spend the money to get a 3/0 or smaller brush with pure natural red sable and then learn to use it properly. If you get paint on your brush and then make a line on paper or your palette while twisting the brush against the surface you're using, you will get a nice fine point that will do tiny details to your heart's content.

    There is a legitimate use for toothpicks, however. If there are small bits of paint that you need to remove around the outlines of symbols, particularly in small areas that you will not be able to use a Q-tip in without wrecking a good portion of the symbol, toothpicks can be used to carefully scrape away that extra paint.

  • Don't store your paint brushes dirty or on the brush end. Either of these things can ruin your brush and at the very least will ruin your ability to get a nice tip on it. Clean them after you use them (I've ruined a number of brushes by getting distracted by something shiny and wandering away before doing this) and always store them tip up in the shape you want them to keep.
  • A don't that is related to painting is dying to change the main color of the pony. Many people swear by it, but it has many problems. It is not permanent. It will fade and far more easily than paint. It often will fade unevently and leave differently shaded splotches. You can only dye darker than the base color and the base color will also influence the end result (for example, a yellow pony dyed blue will turn a green of some sort). It can bleed into the paint. It can bleed onto ponies that are touching it. Any glue that's on the pony will resist the dye, leaving areas that are the original color. The cons far outweigh the pro of a relatively low learning curve. You're much better off finding a pony that's the right color in the first place, doing a full body repaint, or if it's a one-time sort of thing, finding someone to do the full-body repaint for you.

There are a couple of options as far as paints go. If customizing is just something you're testing out to see if you like it, just get some craft quality acrylic paints from somewhere like Michael's or Walmart. Most of them cost under one dollar for a two ounce bottle. If, on the other hand, you're more serious about this and are sure it's worth the time and money, don't waste it on the cheap paints. Get model acrylics. These are artist quality but have the pigment ground down finer than the big tubes of acrylics you'll find in art sections of stores, which is better to use on small things like ponies. I recommend the Vallejo and Formula P3 brands. Vallejo has a wide variety of colors and mediums between their Model and Game lines and come in a bottle with a dropper that is very nice as long as you keep them upright so paint doesn't dry in the dropper. Formula P3 is a newer brand that doesn't have nearly as many colors, but the paints are excellent. They have lots of pigment so that they provide a lot of coverage even if you water them down for smoothness. This means that if you need to do something like paint a light color over a dark one, you can do it in much fewer layers than is usual. I've been able to paint yellow over black and get the black covered up nicely in two coats, which is amazing.

A common complaint people have is that they shake too badly to paint detail. The truth of the matter is that everyone shakes. The key to overcoming this is to brace yourself well. First, brace your elbows or forearms on the edge of your work table. Next, brace your wrists together. If this makes it impossible to paint in the area you need to reach, make sure to brace each hand on the object you're painting so that they're still connected. This reduces your shaking and makes it so that if you do shake, your hands, paint brush, and subject are all moving pretty much the same way because of being braced against each other.

To get paint that is smooth and without brush marks can require the paint to be watered down. Every craft quality acrylic paint I've seen requires watering. Model paints can vary on this depending on the brand, color, and the look you want. Use your eyedropper to carefully control the amount of water you add to the paint and mix it in with a brush.

Full body repaints can be done one of three ways: with very watered down paint, with dry brushing, or with an airbrush. I've had no luck with painting with watered down paints, so I'll leave you to experiment or read other tutorials for that. Dry brushing involves loading up a dry brush with paint, dabbing most of it onto a scrap piece of paper, and then carefully brushing it onto the surface you want painted. This is very useful for putting in shading and highlights, particularly on detailed scuplted pieces. Airbrushing has a high learning curve and has a fairly substantial investment required, particularly if you're going to get nice equipment, but produces a beautiful smooth coat when used right. It can also be used to do gradients and much, much more.

When airbrushing, either use a spray booth that has ventilation drawing the paint particles away from you or do it outside, preferably with a mask. The aerosoled paint particles are very easy to breath in, and naturally enough, it's bad business to have bits of paint floating around in your lungs. There are paints specifically formulated for airbrushing, but they're expensive. This is actually where cheap craft acrylics come in very handy. They're great to use with airbrushing and because they're so cheap, when they start getting gloppy with age, there's no pain in throwing them out rather than spending the time to do things like sift the paint globs out to save the $7+ bottle of airbrush paint. Mix up the paint with a lot of water. When ready, it should seem just a tad more viscous than water, barely a noticeable difference. If you get thick flecks of paint coming out from the airbrush, your paint is too thick.

With painting, it's best to go from the lighter colors to the darker ones whenever possible. Masking areas can help accomplish this sometimes. Make sure your masking tape is tacky enough that it will stick well in the area you need it to without being so tacky that it will damage the paint when you remove it. Masking tape can also be useful when doing things like lines you need to be very straight. Be very careful when doing this, though, as it can be difficult to get it to lay properly on some of the curves of a ponies body sometimes, leaving small areas where the paint can get under the tape.


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