AndyJ
Active Member
The Rub
I have a problem. Alright I have several, but right now my issue is this: A core tentant of my business is quick-turn props for film and TV. It's not uncommon I'll get a call on a Friday for a prop that has to be in an actors hands Monday morning. And while I have a pretty good workflow for this (budget for caffeine) I haven't put the time I should have into finding the best paint process for me. Unfortunately, this has resulted in some problems with less than durable paint finishes. I bought 10 different airbrush paints in order to remedy this--here's what I found!
The Test
I wanted to see what these paints could do on their own. No primer, no basecoat, no additives--just pure paint power. As a test subject, I 3D printed these little morsels out of Formlabs Grey Model Resin. They were post cured for 2 hours and hit with 0000 steel wool. The SLA resin is similar in feel to urethane resins, so I would definitely say these tests are applicable if you're using cast resin or even other plastics as well.
I sprayed these on in enough coats to give full coverage, left them for an hour, and tried to scratch them with my fingernail. I then left them for another full 24 hours and tried again.
The Culprits
In order to be considered for this test, these paints all had to be both:
A) Readily available
B) Available in enough colors that I felt I could easily mix any color I needed.
This unfortunately eliminated a lot of automotive paints, as well as popular laquers like Mr. Color. I'm sure they're great paints, but they're no good to me if I can't get adhold of them! In the end, I settled on these 10:
- Amsterdam Acrylic Ink
- Daler-Rowney FW Acrylic Ink
- Magic Color Acrylic Ink
- Montana Acrylic Paint
- Molotow One4All Acrylic Paint
- Createx Illustration Acrylic Paint
- Koh-I-Nor Ink
- Copic Alcohol Ink
- Spectrum Noir Alcohol Ink
- Polytranspar Laquer Paint
I got all these in black, which probably really confused someone at the Blick warehouse.
The Results
I'm not going to provide a commentary or anything on the individual paints, as the reality is, if it doesn't win this test, nobody is problably going to buy it anyway. But I will sum up some general conclusions in the next section. For now, here are my results!
-
[*]Amsterdam Acrylic Ink
[*]Daler-Rowney FW Acrylic Ink
[*]Magic Color Acrylic Ink
[*]Montana Acrylic Paint
[*]Molotow One4All Acrylic Paint
[*]Createx Illustration Acrylic Paint
[*]Koh-I-Nor Ink - Copic Alcohol Ink
- Spectrum Noir Alcohol Ink
- Polytranspar Laquer Paint
- Big Image Comparing them all
Thoughts
Wow, that Polytranspar took a while to cure, but when it did, that's a very impressive result! Also great show from Montana and Spectrum Noir.
In general, marker inks went on very opaque and dried almost metallic looking. Print inks like the Koh-I-Nor had more a graphite finish than black and wern't super durable. Acrylic paints were VERY matte and deep black, but surprisingly quite transparent.
For marker inks, you can get them in any color you can imagine, except one: white. I took longer than I care to admit trying to figure out why Copic didn't have such a basic color.
Some of these, like the Molotow, you can get the same color as a liquid, marker, and a spray can. I think that's a big deal--imagine being able to paint a prop with a spray can, and doing touchups with a marker.
The best bottle by far is the Molotow. It has a big, easy to unscrew cap, and a very controllable nozzle. The worst is the Spectrum ink--each bottle came in it's own cardboard box, in an actual glass vial, with a separate bulb dropper. The cool thing is you can totally buy the Molotow bottles empty and fill them with whatever.
The marker inks just look so much like anodized metal. I'm definitely playing more them them in the future for that kind of a look.
Let me hear your thoughts! Which one do you like best?
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