Prop Painting | The Smuggler's Paint List

what's up you awesome geeks i'm brian this is the smugglers room and in this week's geek occasion we're going to talk about paint specifically the kind of paint that we use on a lot of our projects you see we've been asked this a number of times and recently our friend bobby from the smugglers guild reached out and asked us if we could go over our paint and suggestions that we might have for you so today let's take a look at our paint and now it's time for some eco [Music] okay first on the list is spray paint that's right good old-fashioned rust-oleum spray paint rust-oleum being the brand that i use most often now i'll say that in a lot of forums and a lot of different places on the internet when it comes to prop making rust-oleum they get a bad rap i see a lot of negative reviews on the overall finish but what i'll say is for the type of projects we do and the way we use it this paint works really well and it's my go-to i have three specific paints from rust-oleum that i start with the first gray primer because everything in space seems to be based on gray gray primer works really well at getting an initial coverage of your project it's flat there's no reflective surface to it it goes on really easily and i'm able to build from that next up is going to be filler primer so filler primer has a unique uh viscosity to it and a lot of times when i'm working with 3d prints or something like that i'll use the filler primer its thickness allows a lot of the gaps that maybe you missed or didn't stand completely flush to be filled and it also really helps to point out areas that need more work maybe that needs spot putty and so on so filler primer works really well to get a base layer down and build up a little of the thickness you're looking for okay the last in the primer category is this red rust primer from rust-oleum now it comes in a couple of different looking covers meaning like the artwork on the front of the bottle but overall it's the red rust color primer the great thing about this is that i use this as a finish color as well on a lot of things we did it on our comic con cover we've used it as accent covers when we did our laptop and we used it on the fat bantha refrigerator build the thing is the red rust color itself it looks uh really bland initially but we add a sealant to it that helps pull out the color and i'll cover that in a bit now two other spray paints of note color wise that i use a lot is smoky beige for one which we did the entire fat bantha refrigerator as well as our laptop covers and i also use this gloss dark gray this works really well because you get a nice glossy color over the top of your project and it's a slightly darker gray than what you get out of just the gray spray paint most of the areas in the room that have a dark gray color is simply this last on the list and probably most important in the spray paint category for me is the rust-oleum aluminum metallic spray paint now you're not going to get this super shiny chrome finish that you would from some really high dollar paints but the point is with this guy i can get a shiny silver look to a lot of 3d printed gribblies or molded gripleys or just parts and pieces that i want to have a little bit of aluminum look to them and once they're covered with a little bit of grime when we do the weathering most of the time it works perfectly i've also recently started doing a lot of brushed aluminum looks with this spray paint spray this down on top of a gray primer hit it with a little steel wool and you get a really interesting brushed steel look and it's cheap overall next on our paint travels is liquitex basic the first thing i like about this is the price you can get a bottle like this mars black for around 450 to 8 depending on where you find it there are often sales on amazon but more often than that i see them at michael's grouped in bundles for less than 15 bucks the last time i was able to buy six of these together and i think it was 12 or so now these are water-based so i can mix these with water thin them out and use them to do really good weathering now being that they're latex they tend to dry quickly so i don't have a lot of working time but overall i can take things like this is burnt sienna and i've got a little raw umber mars black and i think a little bit of cream over there i can mix these three or four different paints together to get a wide range of colors for our weathering one of the other aspects i love about the liquitex stuff is a bottle like this will last you a really long time if you're just doing weathering with it i think i've had this bottle for over a year now i've never used liquitex to completely cover an entire project however i've seen other channels especially those that deal with eva foam projects use the liquitex basics to cover a lot of their projects painting them on with just a normal brush and then sealing them afterwards so they have a lot of versatility to them okay speaking of foam in our recent star wars foam shields we used liquitex heavy body acrylic now these are more expensive per bottle to be sure however they have a deep rich color that when we used them on the shield it turned out wonderful for what we were going for chrissa also recently used this same variety this same manufacturer when she added a lot of the detail paint of iron on our ig-88 beer tap display the beer rail that we're building it comes in so many different varieties of color and they really do go a long way the beer rail for example was almost six feet long end to end and she mixed a variety of colors together to get the overall look we were after you can also use these heavy body acrylics with water to thin them out and make them go a little further so for example you were going to use some of the colors to do some weathering you could make a little go a long way one of the aspects of the heavy body acrylics that i really like are the rich silver and bright silver colors that you get these work really well to go in later on a project and do highlights in certain areas where maybe you wanted that chipping effect from the silver to show through on your project and you didn't do any type of mustard or liquid latex chipping effects before you got to that stage these colors go on really well and they look great in the end okay something that's worth mentioning that might not be exactly a paint but more of a wax is rub and buff now we use rub and buff on all different types of projects we've used them on our best scar i've used them to accent silver edges and we've used them to actually cover an entire part of a project so what is rubbing buff well i'm not going to get too in the weeds or technical but essentially it's a wax mixed with fine metallic powders and then it has a base pigment incorporated into it so the silver looks silver the gold looks gold but there's actually metal powders in this now what you do is you apply it to an area and then you can come back and you can buff it to get a nice sheen to the outside when we've done our vascular for example when we go back and buff over the top the best car actually get a reflective sheen to them and i've seen that used and many of our projects were able to get little accents done with rub and buff specifically it's a great piece to have in your arsenal and you don't need a lot per project we've had tubes that have lasted years of use because just a little bit goes a very long way one person that i've seen use it very often is adam savage on a lot of his projects he'll bust out a little rub and buff and you can add a nice accent to it the next thing i'm going to touch on is airbrush and airbrush paints specifically now i'm only going to pick some of the certain colors that we use on our projects and a couple of specific brands that i found that i like the most now this isn't sponsored by any of the brands in this episode these are just things that we use that we keep stock in our arsenal that i pull out pretty much every time we do a project vallejo has a metallic set of colors for airbrush it's not the cheapest thing especially if you buy them all together but the metallic colors they have really are wonderful i've got here a little arctic blue that's got a lot of speckles and shine to it they're black that's the metallic version it's like a darker color gunmetal so you get a sheen you get a sparkle to it and yet you get this kind of deep charcoal this black is kind of my go-to on a lot of our blaster builds there's things like silver and chrome and this one is a steel color there's a whole variety of these i like the vallejo paints mostly for my airbrush because i don't have to do a lot of thinning or any thinning really at all with any kind of alcohol or anything else to get the paint to flow nice and smooth keep them in a warm dry place shake up the bottles really well and you're good to go one of the vallejo colors i like an awful lot is this jet exhaust metallic color it comes in bottles of this size it's about ten dollars a bottle so i use it on very small projects and that's really kind of key with a lot of the airbrush is that if i have a large project to cover i'm not going to grab a little bottle of vallejo to spray a huge project i'm going to use this for accents for the small bits and details i'm putting on a project and that'll make these bottles last a long time for you now speaking of airbrush let's dive into the very expensive for just a moment because there are a few that are worth mentioning specifically all clad now i've got here an all-clad lacquer gunmetal these bottles are not cheap however if you have a a really stand out prop or pieces of a prop that you want to use these all clad paints are unbelievable and the finish you get on them is amazing one of the project videos we saw last year was bill duran from punish props had done a lightsaber build and they used the all-clad product to give it a nice chrome as well as seal it that finish is exactly what you want for a prop that size and buying an expensive bottle for something like that is probably worth it spraying a full-blown paint booth with this would be insanity not that i haven't been insane before but you get the point i will say one thing about allclad they do have a sealer it's an all-clad brand of sealant that you can put in your airbrush to protect all the paint that you've done on a project that to me is 100 worth it even with the price because the viscosity of that paint itself that sealant doesn't dull your paint so if you have a nice chrome finish on something it won't dull it like many other sealers do i'll tell you that probably 80 percent of the time on our projects we're using a generic rust-oleum sealer whether that's gloss or satin finish and it does alter the absolute look of that paint job so if you want to maintain the same high quality paint going with an all-clad sealer is a really good choice i want to point one more thing out on the vallejo paints that have been asked of us several times over the last few months we did a project where we repainted carissa's small little r5 droid that we picked up at galaxy's edge and everyone asks what that orange color is of the dome will truth be told it's brown actually that's what vallejo has it labeled is as brown it's a brown rlm 26. there's nothing brown about it but it's more orange when you paint it on but i wanted to point that out because it's not something that normally you would think of to get that rusty orange color okay now the last paint i want to cover is one of my favorite it's artisan and it's the water mixable oil paints these paints here particularly the ones i have are lamp black raw umber and ivory black these will give your paint job the most greasy grimy disgusting little look in all the little nooks and crannies that actually brings that weathering to another level in my opinion it has that greasy look because of the oil it also gives you a lot longer working time now i will say again this is the type of paint that i use on smaller props or smaller sections of props i wouldn't go ahead and use this to weather something like our paint booth build in that case we would go back to the basics mix a lot of water and go that direction but for the fine details and small props this is that kind of grimy look that gets in all the little lines that helps everything pop the working time is key for me to be able to put on a layer work it a little bit step back and make other decisions or choices about additional colors or more weathering in one particular area or another i will say however that this stuff takes forever to dry weeks in some cases depending on how much you use so keep that in mind if you're working on a project that maybe you have to turn over really quickly or it's going to be handled very quickly but overall this is probably my favorite and there you have it guys simple straightforward very easy we just wanted to be able to answer that question about the types of paints we use and relate them to the specific projects that we use them on now these geekication videos are not about you running out and spending a bunch of money the whole point of this is that we want to try to transfer as much information to you on products and techniques that we use in the smugglers room so that if you decide to do a project you have some options as you build something out of nothing

Channel: The Smugglers Room

Views: 10,138

Keywords: thesmugglersroom, starwars, prop painting, paints for crafting, ultimate paint guide for props, best prop paints, paint list for props

Id: FR6SY-Uqq20

Length: 14min 54sec (894 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021