Follow along (and help me) as I learn how to airbrush silicone nipples
Follow along (and help me) as I learn how to airbrush silicone nipples
Previously I responded on another topic about fixing a torn vagina so I'll link that here viewtopic.php?p=2431091#p2431091
In it you'll see fixes I tried using sil-poxy and later a no-name silicone doll adhesive from a seller on Amazon. It went from an uncomfortable, scratchy repair to something that looks and feels pretty much good as new. The only complaint I have is the glue is less flexible than the doll's original silicone so I imagine it will cause another tear eventually. But so far the look and feeling of the repair is nearly perfect.
Attempt #1 was not working well Attempt #3 was far better But on to the airbrushing...
I picked up a battery-powered airbrush, some silicone pigments, a 2 part silicone paint, and some solvents for thinning the paint for use in the airbrush and for cleaning it afterward. One of the thinners is supposed to result in a matte finish as well.
My goal is to achieve this type of coloring around the nipples. While researching what colors to purchase I came across http://trycolors.com I'm helpless with mixing colors so I found this site useful since it lets you set a target color and shows a match percentage on how close you have gotten by mixing different base colors together. After some experimenting I found that 2 parts yellow, 9 parts red, 5 parts blue, and 4 parts white got me a 99.2% match on the color I was shooting for. I have no idea how well this will translate into the real world but I found the exercise useful.
As a first test I kept it simple by just making pink. The instructions that came with the paint said to add pigments to the part B component to achieve a desired color, then add part A and then thin the mixture for use in an airbrush. They listed some percentages to use for the paint and thinner and I ended up using 1 gram of part B, 1 gram of part A, and 4 grams of thinner. For the paint I used 1 toothpick drop of white and 1 toothpick drop of red. This produced a very watery paint that I put into the airbrush and sprayed on some paper and some scrap TPE (I later added some yellow and wiped it onto the TPE for another test). I get the impression that the paint mixture was too thin, it really soaked the paper and TPE rather than being a mist of color so I'm going to try adding less thinner next time.
The silicone paint instructions said the working time is only 20 minutes and since this was my first time doing this, I called it quits and cleaned everything with the thinner and then some distilled water. The airbrush came with 3 containers that could be used to spray liquids and I used the small metal black one for the color, the medium plastic one for the thinner, and the large plastic one for the distilled water.
After about 30 minutes I checked the leftover paint and it was still very watery, so I think the 20 minute working time for the paint only applies if you do not thin it. At this point I added a little yellow to some of the left over paint to see if it would make a peach color and it sorta did (pictured on the TPE above).
That's it for now, I'll have some more updates for tomorrow. I'm wondering if the paint will become hard overnight on both the TPE and within the mixing cup. I'm also interested to see how firm it becomes. Will it be as soft as the doll's silicone or will it be closer to the silicone adhesive...we'll see!
If you have any tips or suggestions or noticed something I've done wrong, please let me know!
- carbohvdrates
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Re: Follow along (and help me) as I learn how to airbrush silicone nipples
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Re: Follow along (and help me) as I learn how to airbrush silicone nipples
Re: Follow along (and help me) as I learn how to airbrush silicone nipples
I'm happy to report the original pink paint did dry and became an extremely flexible material, somewhat like a rubber band. It didn't stick to the mixing cup and folded easily. It even stretched around the bottle of thinner and returned to its original shape with no visible damage. Again this was 1 gram of the paint part A, 1 gram of part B, 4 grams of thinner, 1 toothpick drop of white and another drop of red. It did look a little glossy in person so I can see why there's a matte version of the thinner.
With this success I mixed up some more and sprayed it onto the back of the doll's head. I made the paint thicker by only using about 3 grams of thinner but the airbrush had trouble spraying it. I saw a trick on YouTube where you add thinner to the paint inside the airbrush, then hold your finger over the nozzle and spray. This causes the air to go up into the paint mixture and agitate it, and the airbrush started spraying the thinned paint.
After about 6 hours of drying I tried scratching the paint off. Initially it stuck well but once I was able to get a hard edge formed, it came off easier. I forgot to clean the area with alchohol after cleaning it with soapy water so that might have hurt the adhesion, but the instructions for the paint recommend using it within a day or two of casting the original silicone and this is 1 year old silicone, so that's probably a factor. I'll do a better job cleaning for future tests though.
While waiting for this paint to dry I tried the matte thinner for the first time and found it to be extremely different than the normal stuff. There's a fine white powder within it that ends up going everywhere as you use it. When you pour the matte into a cup, the edge it runs down will quickly dry and the resulting powder will blow away with the smallest disturbance. This demonstration video showing usage of the normal and matte thinners https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqNQonhw7uM makes it look as if they behave exactly the same, but I ended up splitting my 100% matte mixture in half in order to add normal thinner for another test. I couldn't do an accurate measurement for how much matte vs normal is in the mixture since I didn't plan for it, but while working with the 100% matte mixture I got the impression that you should only use a small amount rather than making a paint composed 100% of it. The mixing cup on the left has the partial matte and partial normal thinner while the mixing cup on the right is 100% matte.
As you can see the 100% matte paint became a very brittle material that cracked in the bottom of the cup as it dried. It also changed color, a much lighter pink due to all the white powder I imagine.
The part matte and part normal paint was much less brittle and still remained flexible and was able to fold onto itself. It couldn't match the stretch of the 100% normal thinner paint though and ended up tearing when I tried to stretch it around the thinner bottle as I had done with the previous paint. The material didn't completely return to its original shape as well, so the matte thinner really changes the properties of the dried paint.
So lots of lessons learned today. I was definitely impressed by the flexiblity of the 100% normal thinner paint and learned that you should use as little matte thinner as possible to achieve a non-glossy finish. It will take some more experiments to determine how much that is exactly. Also the paint might not stick as well as I'd hope and it makes me wonder if I could add some sil-poxy or the no-name silicone doll adhesive used for the vagina repair to the mix.
I'm going to leave the pink color on the back of the doll head for tomorrow's testing and attempt to paint over it with the nipple color. This test will mimic the faded pink areolas that the doll has right now. To my now partially trained eye I see the remaining paint looks dry and cracking...perhaps a sign that they used some matte thinner in their own paint!
Re: Follow along (and help me) as I learn how to airbrush silicone nipples
Re: Follow along (and help me) as I learn how to airbrush silicone nipples
Today was my first attempt at mixing the desired color and spraying it onto the back of the doll's head. This area was previously sprayed with a light pink color and I scraped away about half of this beforehand so I could do both a coverage test and another adhesion test. The watery paint is very translucent so I wanted to see how many layers it would take to cover the existing, faded pink color on the doll. For the adhesion test I cleaned the back of the head with alcohol this time so the paint I sprayed today on the non-painted area will have the best possible chance of sticking. I used the bottom of a mixing cup to create a 28mm diameter stencil since this small size would fit the test area on the back of the head pretty well. I'm also interested to see how large of a resulting circle will be produced on the back of the head. Now for the tough part, mixing the color! Unfortunately the experimenting I did on http://trycolors.com didn't translate accurately to my particular paint and pigments. I started with 1 tiny toothpick drop of white and red to make a pink color, but as I added more and more red, the tone of the paint deviated from the approximation that trycolors estimated. I had to add blue to make trycolors match what the paint was doing as red was added and very roughly, it seemed that for every 3 parts of red on trycolors, 1 part of blue had to be added to match what the paint was doing. Eventually I added so much red that the tiny drop of white I started with had to be removed from trycolors to match what I was seeing. At this point I gave up on using trycolors and just started adding tiny drops of white to see the result. Eventually this color appeared and it seemed close to the goal. The color is composed of only the paint, red, and white pigments. Here's the scale I've been using along with the final paint mixture of 1g of paint part A, 1g part B, the pigments, and roughly 3.5g of normal thinner (I'm skipping the matte thinner for this first color test). This scale turns off after a few seconds and today I figured out a process to make it easier to use: as I added paint parts and thinner I kept it alive by pressing it occasionally with my finger. This made measuring things out a lot easier. It's a very old scale and only supports 1g increments so I have to estimate a bit when creating the mixture, but it's one I had on hand and seems to be working so far.
Re: Follow along (and help me) as I learn how to airbrush silicone nipples
Re: Follow along (and help me) as I learn how to airbrush silicone nipples
Re: Follow along (and help me) as I learn how to airbrush silicone nipples
The 28mm circle stencil resulted in a sprayed circle of just about the same size, so an interesting lesson learned here. I thought the sprayed circle would be a few mm larger but that wasn't the case. I was only holding the stencil 5-10mm off the surface (the airbrush was blowing it around) and tried to hold the brush as perpendicular as I could, so I may need to try holding the stencil further away to get a softer edge around it. The remaining paint from yesterday dried perfectly again, it's very flexible and stretchy. This picture also shows how the paint didn't cover the pink color underneath. This is going to be a problem since the doll's existing nipples have a lot of cracked pink left on them and I've been unable to remove it all. The adhesion test was a huge success: the paint that was sprayed onto the raw silicone could not be scraped off directly, it needed a hard edge to get it peeling. When I sprayed the pink a couple of days ago the area was only cleaned with soapy water and this allowed it to be peeled off with some effort. But before yesterday's spray everything was cleaned with alcohol and the resulting bond was impressively strong. I gave up trying to remove the paint by scraping at the edges along the raw silicone (bottom of the picture) and instead started scraping the loosely attached pink paint at the top. Without it maybe I could cut the paint at a thick spot and get it to peel, but rather than doing that I'm going to use some petroleum jelly as a release agent and see how that goes. While watching YouTube videos on how to airbrush I saw a recommendation to take apart the brush so you better know how to operate and clean it. So I took that advice and disassembled it into the main parts and looked where the cleaning tools could be used. It took me awhile to reassembly everything because I had trouble getting the orientation of the spring (denoted with red arrows) correct. During this I also read the manual to discover the airbrush has 3 PSI settings with a color-changing light to visually indicate each one. You turn the airbrush on/off by pressing this button for 1-2 seconds and once it's on, you can cycle through the settings by clicking the button quickly, less than 1 second for each click. I ended up using the high and low settings while practicing how to airbrush free hand later on.
Re: Follow along (and help me) as I learn how to airbrush silicone nipples
Re: Follow along (and help me) as I learn how to airbrush silicone nipples
Re: Follow along (and help me) as I learn how to airbrush silicone nipples
Here's how the 1g of matte to 2g of normal thinner turned out. I'm wondering if the matte particles in the paint mixture settled while spraying because the first layer sprayed well and resulted in a nicely matte finish, but the second layer (that's more concentrated in the middle) ended up being glossy and didn't spray as smoothly. Next time I spray matte I'll agitate the paint every few minutes with the backflow technique (hold finger over end and pull trigger back slowly). I've done this a few times and it works well; there's enough control to prevent causing the paint to splash out.
The petroleum jelly worked perfectly as a release agent. I don't think it caused any difference to the resulting texture of the paint but you can see it had some lint in it. Here's the head all cleaned up again and the matted paint mixture from yesterday. The upper part of the mixture became glossy as the matte particles settled within it overnight. Just like last time, it didn't flex as much as paint made with normal thinner and you can see how it cracked as it was folded and stretched. It also doesn't fully return to it's original shape after stretching, it ends up with wrinkles. I'm going to use less of the matte thinner next time, something like 0.5g matte with 2.5g normal. After some googling and experimenting with trycolors, I eventually was able to recreate the doll's base color. I only used white, red, and yellow though I added 1 part of blue in trycolors since that ends up happening in real life as red is added. Here's all the tools and products being used while I did the airbrushing: a heat gun, face shield and N95 mask, petrolum jelly, empty 2-liter bottle with paper towels in it to act as a poor-man's airbrush cleaning pot, the paint, some thinner and pipette to rinse out the airbrush when complete, and the airbrush itself. I'm using my bathroom's exhaust vent and also improved the lighting by bringing in a couple of bright flashlights and shinning them at the ceiling. The reflections helped to even out the light and I could see a little better this time. I only worked on the right nipple today and put on a coat of petrolum jelly. I covered the entire chest so no overspray will stick in case I mess something up. And here's the problem I encountered: the paint was too translucent to provide any coverage. You can see it's barely noticable on the white paper but on the doll itself, I couldn't see much of a difference. I added 4 layers before it started to become runny so tomorrow I'm going to add more pigment in the same ratios to the paint mixture. I'll bring a drop of paint up along the side of the mixing cup and watch it run down to help determine how translucent it is. Hopefully I can make the paint less translucent but I know there's a limit to how much pigment can be added before it interferes with the drying process. I'm wondering if I'll have to find what this point is exactly since I need a much more opaque mixture. But who knows, maybe it will look better when it's dry tomorrow, we'll see!
Re: Follow along (and help me) as I learn how to airbrush silicone nipples
As far as the opaqueness wonder if that's just the nature of silicone. And unless your using extreme color density, your going to have some depth of translucency to it no matter what.
Maybe a dumb idea, but i wonder if you used a light application of makeup on the areola and nipples first, then sprayed on top of that. I wonder if it would give more depth to the color and solve your translucency problem. But the question is if that will affect how well the paint sticks.
Your after shot still looks massively better with the skin tone paint. I would be happy with that result I think. And probably good enough to hide the damage once the pink color goes on.
Re: Follow along (and help me) as I learn how to airbrush silicone nipples
I'd hesitate to apply anything but this paint to the silicone based on how little anything seems to stick. When I did the first adhesion test on the back of the doll's head and only used soapy water to clean it, the paint didn't stick well. So if I go overtop a layer of makeup I imagine it will be even worse.
Look how small the matte paint on the left shrunk compared to the glossy on the right. Both were mixed and let dry in mixing cups with the same diameter. So besides being more brittle, matte thinner also makes the paint shrink [edit from the future, discovered that adding any thinner to the silicone will make it shrink no matter if it's matte or not...see tomorrow's post]. This probably won't happen when it's attached to silicone (it wasn't attached to anything since it dried in the mixing cup), but maybe the matte paint has some internal stresses after it dries on the silicone. Here's what it looks like mixing a color. I'm using maybe 4 times as much pigment as was done with the initial tests since I'm trying to make the paint less translucent. Using more pigment has made an improvement to the coverage and I'm going to continue increasing how much is used in future mixes. This is also what 1g of part B looks like. You create the color you want and then add 1g of part A, mix, then add 3-4g of thinner. The airbrush I'm using needs the paint to be thin enough to drip off the mixing stick with very quick, small drops; if there is any long streaming of the paint off the mixing stick, it's too thick and will clog the airbrush or cause it to splatter rather than spray a fine mist of color. My plan for today was to spray the nipple that had been painted with the coverup color and let it dry for at least 1 hour, then spray it again with the goal color. I completely messed up the coloring though, it was far too light for what I wanted so I decided to add some red and try it on the non-covered-up nipple. I messed up this color as well and added too much red in the heat of the moment I still went with it and by the end of the day I had used 3 different colors. Top picture is the initial state after the glossy cover-up color dried overnight and below is after the too-light of pink (and matte) color was added. The coverup helped some but also the pink color is close to what the doll original had. The pink doesn't look matte either so maybe I went too thick again and/or I need to use a higher ratio of matte thinner. Here's the other nipple with the top picture being the initial state with just the dried petroleum jelly, middle is the too-redish pink that was let dry for 3 hours, and bottom is the second layer of paint. The matte finish is starting to appear around the edges as it's drying right now but the middle is looking glossy again. So maybe the same situation as the other nipple, too thick of matte paint and/or too little of the matte thinner. The color is more red than I was going for but it did a good job of covering the lighter pink underneath...at least on the top and sides. There's a large chunk of the lighter pink on the bottom and it's showning through the color unfortunately. Maybe a third coat will help and this will be in the game plan for tomorrow. There's also a large paint splatter on the left side. I noticed the paint starting to splatter towards the end of the session as it got thicker, so again I need to learn to recognize this and add thinner when it happens.
One other difference with this one, I didn't use the stencil on it, it's freehand. I made it a bit larger than my goal but it was good practice. I'm going to try using the stencil to create a light dusting of color, then remove it and do the rest freehand. It seems like going freehand makes it easier to create a smooth gradation of color along the edge. For another quick test I tried shading the thumbnail slightly. It was easy to spray and wipe off, and try again. I wiped it off before drying and will revisit this in the future. During all the painting today the airbrush got good and clogged. This is the first time it couldn't be cleared quickly so I did a full teardown and even some troubleshooting. I initially started with a toothpick but it took every tool the airbrush came with to get the dried paint out: from the small diameter wires to the thicker ones, and the smaller brushes to the larger ones, I needed them all. When I reassembled everything the airbrush wasn't working correctly, there was air blowing up into the paint cup. I eventually discovered an important o-ring had come off and am pointing at it with the toothpick. This o-ring is on the end of the "needle cap" and creates a seal against the airbrushes' main body. If it's not present the high pressure air goes out through the "nozzle cap" a little, but it mainly goes up into the paint!
During the troubleshooting I also discovered this brass screw buried inside the airbrush and it was removable with a flat head screwdriver. It feels like it presses against another o-ring that I can't see but assume it's there based on the research I did when creating this drawing. This airbrush is unlike typical ones so I made this drawing to help share the knowledge. I didn't include the trigger mechanism since it matches how other airbrushes are setup and it simply moves the needle forward and back. Based on all this, the plan for tomorrow is remove all paint from the light-pink nipple and try to add a few EXTREMELY LIGHT layers of the correct pink color and hopefully see a matte finish by the end. I'll go back to the 1g matte thinner to 2g normal ratio as well to help improve the chances of obtaining the matte look. For the other nipple I'm going to add more pink layers to see if the doll's original light pink will eventually be covered up. One challenge is having to mix new paint every couple of hours and getting them to match. If I make a batch, spray it, then wait 1 hour; I think I'll be able to use it again if I add a little thinner. But I think I'll need to mix another batch for the third hour and layer, so I've got to get better at color matching. After every layer I'll spray thinner through the airbrush and then remove the nozzle cap and needle cap to completely clean the front of the airbrush...another important lesson learned.
- Justinpassinthru
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Re: Follow along (and help me) as I learn how to airbrush silicone nipples
My main takeaway is that I'll simply buy a new doll when it comes time to repaint her.