Tips for Painting With Sharpie

[jonnyfiyve]

I painted my silver battle rifle with a sharpie and it came out pretty good. However, sharpie will not stick well and can be scratched off with ease.

I haven't tested this, but this might work for making the sharpie more permanent.

Wash the parts in soap and water, once dry sand them with a high grit paper to remove some of the protective coating.
Very important to use a sand paper that isn't too rough or you will see scratches when you sharpie it.

Once sanded, sharpie the parts and spray clear a finishing or you could even use clear nail polish.

[DemarcationMedia]

Hm, interesting. I may try that.

[JakeBadman]

Use PAINT

This. Do some research, there is a lot of good info here. I have been trying out some things on spares and what not.

I think sharpies and perhaps even the metallic pen markers work best on small details only.

not sure if you need to top coat afterwards but might make sense if you are going to be doing a lot of handling.

[KTtoys]

The best advice with using for using sharpie is dont. Buy paints. Sharpies will always limit you and never allow you to progress

[basicusername]

I don't have much sharpie help (The only figured I used a sharpie on was a yellow spartan).
Here is how I do a wash on a figure
1: take a armor part ex: helmet, shoulder pad, lower leg
2: paint black/silver/brown ALL over the armor piece
3: get a second brush with water on it
4: use the water brush to wipe of the excess paint, don't press to hard otherwise it will all go
4: now you should see that a lot of paint got in the crevasses of the armor bringing out detail
5: repeat once more if it doesn't look dirty enough. This time ,however, press even less with the water brush.
This actually doesn't require that much paint. A general cheap container of the stuff can do, I've got ones that i can fit 2 or 3 in my hand. Most importantly DON’T let the paint dry until you have used water brush on it.

[Errex]

Sharpie tends to rub off quite easily, but it lasts a bit longer if you clean the piece you are painting with warm, soapy water first.

[SpartanGregor113]

I'm pretty late to this, but I can't help but feel like I should add to this conversation. From my experience, Sharpie customization is incredibly messy in terms of the figure. I used it on the marine from the Arctic Combat Unit pack a long long time ago, and it rubbed off about 2 days later, leaving the figure stained. I also used it for Nexus' visor when I made the "Fireteam Frostbite" animation, which also didn't work very well. It rubs away too easily, yet also tends to stain figures so you can't remove it entirely. Nexus's helmet had a blue tint that didn't match the rest of the armor at all, which is why I decided to use it to make Survivor's Moronic Misadventures figure.

I'm not sure the reason you don't want to use paint, but if it's because you are afraid of ruining the figure and not being able to fix it, Sharpie is going to be far worse than paint. Paint is pretty easy to remove if you want to redo it. It takes a little while to get all of it off, and you might need a sewing pin or something with a small point to get the paint out of some of the crevices, but if you just stick it in hot water a few times and scrape off the paint, you can get nearly, if not all, of the paint off. If the reason is something else, such as paint being too messy outside of the actual figure, then I suppose I understand. However, I still thought it would be good to tell you that my experience with painting has been far better than my experience with Sharpie customs.

[ShlubCustoms]

This just shows my own ignorance of the topic, but the figures I attempted to paint with Sharpie tended to rub the ink off on my hands when I picked them up after drying. It's actually the reason I switched to paint. How do you deal with that?

[Elemaster]

This just shows my own ignorance of the topic, but the figures I attempted to paint with Sharpie tended to rub the ink off on my hands when I picked them up after drying. It's actually the reason I switched to paint. How do you deal with that?

You would need to seal the part. A cheap way to do that is clear nail polish - this can cause the sharpie to darken or fade a bit but it generally prevents rubbing off in the hand.

[Thelvadamee132]

Nail polish remover is a great tool. If you mess up, just get a Q-tip and some nail polish remover and you can rub it off to help make the details stand out more, and to help it look less messy. Be careful which type you use though because when I used it on my sharpie-painted figures, I actually melted dares helmet(luckily she wasn't wearing the human head piece)