Here is a paint restoration I’m doing on some extra figures I have. First up is Ray. As you can see, He’s in fairly good shape except for the scuff marks on his belly and paint loss to his head and hands…
and some scuffing on his boots
Here is a close-up of his head to show that the origional paint didn’t always stay “in the lines”, so don’t worry too much if you don’t either.
First order of business is to clean any dirt and loose paint off. I use Bleache-Wite tire cleaner and an old toothbrush to do this
After the scrubbing, make sure to rince off the excess cleaner and dry completely before trying to paint.
The next step is to pick out the colors you are going to use. Chances are they will not be a close match if you use them straight from the bottle, but sometimes you get lucky as they will tend to dry a bit darker. Here are my choices for his hair, hands and boots.
I’ll start from the bottom - up and do the boots first. You can see that the wet paint is much lifgter than the boot color.
To darken the orange, you might think too add some black. This would be bad. The boot color is really more to the red side of the rainbow, so to match the boot color I mix in some red to the orange, checking against the origional color untill I get close.
I know that I will never get an exact match, so I completely repaint both boots. The separation of the boots by the trouser bottoms helps to give the illusion that they are the same orange as on the rest of the figure.
The origional paint on the hands does not match the plastic they used for Ray’s head, so I’m going to use the flesh color straight from the bottle. The hair color I chose turned out to be a bit dark and too brown, so I mixed it with a lighter and slightly yellow brown untill I got a close match. As the color was not exact, I repainted all his hair, eyebrows and eyes with my mix.
To minimize the scuffing and get rid of the black paint mark on Ray’s belly, I use a 3-way nail file/buffer. This one I picked up at a Dollar store. The file and smooth sections get rid of most of the scuff lines and the black paint. The shine section buffs out the plastic close to it’s origional look.
So, Ray’s all cleaned up and ready to bust ghosts again.
Winston is gonna need a little bit more than paint to get him back in busting form. Somehow he lost the tip of his nose. That will be for next week. Please leave some comments or questions.
It depends where you get them. GamesWorkshop has them listed at $3.70 a “pot”. I’ve gotton them at various game stores for anywhere from $4 to $5 a pop. They are acrylic, so mixing, thinning and clean-up can all be done with water. Other acrylic paints could be used, but these have a good bite to them and adhere to plastics and vinyl really well. Here is their website:
Great job on the restore Capt. Do you use anything like clear coat to seal the finish? I wasn’t sure how easy the acrylics would chip once they were dry. Also P3 paints from Privateer Press have a great pigment and coverage. Similar to Gamesworkshop’s “foundation” paint line.
The acrylics have a bit of flex to them. I’ve used them to repaint some vinyl stuff and it hasen’t had any trouble staying put. Then again, I tend to display my toys rather than play with them. For a while, I was spraying my repaints with a acrylic matte finish, them using a semi gloss acrylic varnish for the hair and any leather or other thing that would deserve a sheen and then I’d touch up the eyes, teeth, buttons and any other surface that need to shine with a high gloss acrylic. My last figures to get the works were “Mars Attacks”. Here you can see an untouched figure (with Marty Feldman eyes) on the left and my 2 remakes.
Are the P3 paints acrylic and how do they run price wise?
Putty is always fun, but in this instance, I’m going to use Zap-A-Gap superglue to make a self forming nose tip.
Here I am fortunate enough to have a 2nd Winston to compair noses with (What’s up with the skin color change?). As you can see, Winston on the right comes up a little short.
A small daub of glue on the end of a straight pin so I don’t overload Winstons nose.
Just a touch where the tip was, then I set him with his face hanging over the egde of my workdesk and let gravity form the new tip of his nose
After a few hours I can go to work on the paint restoration. First I remove some errant paint scuffs with my fave, the 3-in- nail file.
Going throught the numbers and the blue plastic is back to new.
Besides his face and hands, Winston needs some touch up on his uniform. The yellow-ish collar, right cuff and zig-zag on his right pant leg need help. The red on his radio and elbow pad need a fix too. I choose colors that look close to the origionals. If I can’t “fade” a color to blend with the origional, I will then paint the entire area.
The yellow was close but not able to be faded, so I had to repaint the sections. The red was closer so I got away with spot touch-ups.
I gave his hair a coat of black, so Winstons skin color is next. A mixture of equal parts of these 2 colors gets me something very close to the origional. Because it will not be exact, I paint his whole face and hands.
All that’s left to do is touch up his eyes and eyebrows with some black paint.
New nose and new paint.
Now he’s al ready to join Ray
Comments or questions please. Next time it’s Egon’s turn.
Best tip for mixing paint is find a color that is closest to the one you are trying to match and then find the next lighter or darker color (which ever way you need to go) and mix from there. Using white or black to try to match the color rarely works and you wind up making a pastel or muddy version of that color.
Egon gets his turn. The closest colors are selected for touching up. As I don’t have a lavender for his boots and stripes or a light lemon yellow for his hair, I pulled darker versions of those colors that I can turn into pastel like colors by adding white.
His hands are quite scuffed as is the box on his belt.
There are chips in the orange design on his flight suit and shirt but what really took a beating is his hair. He is also missing a corner of his chin and the tip of his nose. I will fix those after I do his repaint.
I start by putting a brush full of purple in a small container. I then add a brush full of white and mix to see how close I have gotten. I keep adding and mixing until I get a little lighter than the origional, as the paint will dry a bit darker. It’s mixed in the container so I can close it up and keep the color in case I have to go back and touch up some spots.
My paint mix is very close, you can just make out where I touched up the middle stripe on his pant leg. The boot repaints look even better because the color is broken up bu the pant cuff.
The orange is a good match and the flesh tone for the hands is actually better than the origional so I don’t have to mess with those. Which brings me to the hair color. Same thing as the boots, keep adding white untill it is close to origional.
Even though this match came out spot on (sometimes you get real lucky) I’ll repaint all of the hair on the figure.
Orange design is fixed and the hands copmpletely repainted. Looks like I missed 2 spots on the belt box, good thing I have extra lavender left.
Painting is done! I’ll have to do the super glue trick to reform his chin and nose, but that’s for later.
Right now he can join Ray and Winston and enjoy their restored paint jobs.
Used the 3 way file on Egon’s left boot and smoothed out the gouge. I didn’t fill it in so you could see where it was, but I did repaint the area.
I mixed a bit of a light brown/beige into the light flesh paint to match up with Egons face color. The super glue fixed his nose tip and chin but needed to be painted. His glasses make for a good dividing line so I only had to paint the lower half of his face
Touched up the belt box while I was at it. So that completes Egon’s repaint and I thought I was all done…
…until she arrived.
Janine came along in a lot of Slimers that I got off eBay. She has some small color loss in her hair and on the blue design of her jumpsuit.
Janine is done. I couldn’t get the color on her suit correct, so I went out and bought some Hawk Turquoise to mix in with my Ultramarine Blue paint. Her hair touch up was acombo of Blood Red and Scab Red. Gotta love those color names. I’m glad her shoes weren’t scuffed as it would be a devil of a time matching that pink.
Here is Louis with the colors I used to restore him.
That green on his outfit was impossible to match, the closest I got was a mixture of Hawk Turquoise and Scorpion Green for those of you who are playing along. I did both his arms with Elf Flesh as it was a better match than the origional paint.
Here is his close-up. I sanded off the bit of purple paint that was on his right leg.
One big shiney happy family, now all I need is for Venkman to show up.
