On most of your builds, they will not need any prep before paint but the more involved your stippling plan, the more you need to plan ahead.
You can see I have my stippling layout planed and now for the prep needed for what I am planning on.
Notice the wolf with a diamond armer thing going on. My plan is to take that diamond pattern down and around to meet the wolf on the other side, but the rest of the grip will be a different pattern. So, I did a layout for where the translon will be. This can all be done after paint but here is what I see looking ahead for this build.
The armor on the wolf is going to be antic brass with the diamond being a flat black or deep flat black so to keep from having to pant the pistol and then paint the wolf I want to paint with gold once, this is why it is so important to look ahead and have your steps planed out.
I want to take that diamond pattern from the wolf onto the stippling with outer lines on the diamond being gold and the inter part of the diamond being a flat black. To do this I need to do my stippling first so I can paint.
After stippling I will do my gold paint and cure. Then paint with flat black but only cure for around an hour.
By curing the black for just a short time this lets me brush the stippling to show the gold underneath easily.
Gold being cured and hard, black not completely cure and soft, this is what makes this technique work for the battleworn look. After that you can complete your cure or do a clear coat and cure.
We will see if this plan ahead step works or not.
I will keep you updated and OH!! don't look at the magwell, I am not finished with that.
OK here you see where I started working my layout pattern down from the wolf head.
This gives you a boarder within the HD boarders as a guide for the two types of stippling patterns.
I all so laid out the finger pad with a boarder and then masked it off. I know it's not straight, but the masking is just for keeping paint out of as much of the stippling area as possible because all the paint has to be recovered before stippling. (Remember!! paint does not stipple)
Here you see where I stared adding a stippling pattern, AND It sucks
I will all ways show the stuff that works BUT I will all so show you the stuff that didn't come out too.
So, what to do ??
In my stippling kit I have a 1/2" flat round tip and a flat thing that looks like a foot. By using these two tips I could flatten out the polymer and start over.
Now that I am ready for round three on getting the stippling pattern right here goes.
This is what I wanted to start with.
First, I will paint this wolf with antic brass, and fully cure the antic brass.
Then I will shoot a flat black over that and cure it for about an hour. Doing this will let me do a light brushing, showing the brass from under the black just on the high spots, showing a diamond like pattern out lining the flat black centers. The yellow wolf head will be the antic brass color meeting the diamond out line. If this turns out I think it's going to look great.
I did just a little stippling with the second pattern just to get a feel for what the two types of stippling will look like together. If this all works, it will be a kill combo.
I will go over it one more time before painting just to add some more diamonds in some flat spots.
I'm getting ready for the first coat of paint, masking off as much of the grip as I can to keep paint from getting on areas that I don't intend to paint.
I took out the sample stippling so I can mask off around the wolf keeping paint out of places that I don't intend to paint. Another reason I took the second style of stippling out is the pattern. I thought it might be harder to match a start and stop technique instead of doing the second style of stippling all at once start to finish. I am new to this, and the thought is by doing a random pattern I get into a rhythm in creating my pattern that seems to flow but random, if you understand me. Even a random pattern has a pattern if you think about it.
Here is a good tip; I save my scrape vinyl from making stencils. The reason I do this is for masking off areas that will have masking on these spots for the rest of the painting process. The vinyl will stay stuck tight though all the cure times between paint coats. This build will have at least three coats of paint and one coat of clear, so the masking on the grip will be there for a long time and in the cure oven for at least three times. By using scrape vinyl, I can use a hot air gun to get them to stick and there good for the whole build. At the end of the painting, they come right off and all that is left is cleaning up over spray around the edges. The next post will be adding the second style of stippling, but it may be a while, I have to do painting first and I have not settled on just the right combo to achieve my vision for this build yet.