This is the Horizon 1/6 vinyl Iron Man kit. This kit had been sitting built on the shelf for years. I was never really happy with the paint job that I had done on the kit, as I felt it didn't capture the metallic look of the armour. Recently I disassembled the kit, and repainted it. The following text, and pictures will document the process for getting the metallic finish.

I'll go through my process of painting the kit in the paragraphs below.

 

 

First, the paints. Thes are the 3 main colors I used in painting the figure. I'm using a modified technique that Jerry Buch. used years ago in a modelers resource article, where he painted a Volks Cutey Honey kit. The main thing I wanted was a vibrant metallic finish. I also wanted to use spray cans, instead of an airbrush. The main paints used were Krylons Gold "Short Cuts", Tamiya Metallic Red, and a can of yellow spray paint I had laying around.

 

 

Here you can see the torso, primed and ready for paint. Applying these paints over bare vinyl would be a big mistake, you need a good primer coat as a base. In hindsight, a white primer probably would have worked better.

 

Ok, first, spray on the yellow. The piece above has about 3-4 light coats of yellow on it. All sprayed within a 2 hour period. As soon as the first coat was tacky, on went the next coat. This part is then set aside to dry at least 24 hours.

 

 

The next thing I did was spray on the gold paint. The photo on the left shows the first coat. I sprayed about 3 coats over a couple of hours to get full coverage. They yellow undercoat provides a more brillant gold, than when applied directly over the primer. At this point I set the torso aside, and let it dry for 48 hours. This is very important (I learned the hard way), as the gold takes at least this long to fully cure. Otherwise you'll not be too happy when you peel the mask off after the next round. Once dry, the areas staying gold were masked off with low tack masking tape. Tamiya brand works really well.

 

 

Once masked, the red tamiya paint was then sprayed on. I used a couple of coats to get full coverage. The photo on the rleaft shows the first coat, and the other the last. It is important to pay attention to the coverage of the red. Too much, and you'll loose some of the brillant red that the gold undercoat provides. You still want it to be semi-transparent. A fully opaque coat of red, will not look as brillant. The Tamiya paints dry fairly quickly, and I pulled the masks off after about 20 minutes. I went through a extensive trial and error process in painting this kit. The photos represent the 3 time around on the torso. But it was fun, and I got the results I wanted.