Our resident artist/painter Ben Boyle (extremetmaxxer here on the boards) was kind enough to share a great step by step tutorial on how to paint real looking water droplets.

Alright guys finally got around to painting and typing this one up.

I started out working in House of Kolor paints for this round but again, the same effect can be achieved with Spazstix.

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NOTE: I HAVE TRIED THIS WITH FASKOLOR AND I CAN NOT GET THIS TECHNIQUE TO WORK WITH THE WATER BASED PAINT.... I have tried different additives with no success, although I have not yet tried a glycerin, this may help in keeping a bubble but I don’t know if it will fix the Faskolor problem.

Ok, now that we have all the water based paint users booted out lets get down to business.

All you need for this technique is a spray bottle with mist setting. Don’t try to use the jet setting!

Color wise you can do this technique with any color you want but usually a light, a dark and something in between for the base coat will work, such as a red shadow, yellow highlight, and orange base. This time I’m using a white highlight, black shadow and magic blue pearl for the base.

Step 1
The first step would be to prep your body as usual cleaning out with soap and water or wiping down with a wax and grease remover. I start by scuffing with a gray scotch bright pad from the auto body supply shop to promote adhesion for the House of Kolor paints.

Click for full size view of Picture 1

I threw in a some fire and a little extra something seen at the end of this how-to.

Step 2
Position the body laying on a flat surface as demonstrated in this next picture. I sprayed up from this angle to get a finer mist and then changed to straight above to get some bigger drops. I recommend you practice a little to get a feel for how the water will fall.

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Here is the result.

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Step 3
In this step we start spraying with basic white for the highlights, you really need to get a good flat angle on this and make sure to watch where your over spray is going. I had a design up front to keep the white from making too much of a mess. I sprayed at about 30 psi with a very fine mist pulled about a foot back as low as I could get and I came in closer to just make them a little more obvious for this how-to.

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Here you can see the result and what your drops should look like.

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Step 4
At this point we want to do the same but from the opposite angle with a darker color, for this one I used black.

NOTE: Be very careful when handling the body the water drops are very delicate and you can disturb them very easily.

Result

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Step 5
Time to let this wet little thing dry out here! I used a halogen lamp to speed up the drying process.

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Step 6
At this point I got bored and added some stencil work but here is where you want to back it with what ever color you choose, remember that the white and the black will mute it down somewhat just from the over spray.

Here is what it looks like after it has dried out.

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THE FINAL PRODUCT

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Article written by Ben Boyle

WNYRCINFO.com would like to thank Ben for submitting this how to.