So my daughter is loving her new Ender 2 Pro and printing out Harry Potter figurines to paint. We have been using acrylic paint pens (easier at this age), they have been good, not great. We are having a Harry Potter themed b-day party for her and her friends. I am going to print out a batch of Harry, Ron, and Hermione characters for them all to paint after the play time limit at the trampoline park ends.

was wondering… What kid friendly paint works best for PLA?

  • SSTF@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    10 months ago

    I’d reccomend that as the adult you spray prime the prints first on your own. Hardware store paint is fine for this. I’d suggest white to go along with the following part of the suggestion.

    Craft paints, like Applebarrel or Folk Art are very cheap and found at art stores and WalMarts.

    They have a tendency to be thick and also separate if thinned with a lot of water. The solution is to buy some Flow Aid. Liquitex is a cheap and common brand. You can probably find this at an art store, if not it’s cheap online. Buy some cheap pipettes.

    When you squirt craft paint onto a dry palette, add 1-2 drops of flow aid with the pipette and give it a couple of swirls with the paintbrush. This will make the craft paint run a little more without separating. Depending on how any given paint acts you can add more paint or flow aid to get it to the desired thickness.

    If you’re bold you can experiment with adding flow add little by little directly to the bottles if you want the paint bottles to be ready to use, but you’ll have to experiment to find just the right amount of flow aid to add. I’d say adding too little is better than too much.

    The coverage of this paint is going to be a little transparent which is why the white priming is probably better.

    Obviously the results will not be as fine as dedicated hobby paints, but for a kids first time painting party event, they will work.

  • BrightCandle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    10 months ago

    Army painter or games workshop are very much trusted in the miniature painting scene. They have undercoat spray cans (which as the adult you might need to do yourself) and then the paint sets themselves have all been around a long time with good safety profiles. I haven’t had any issues with this process over pla other than the layer lines being tricky to paint and work with but paint adherence has worked fine.