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We made a cardboard booth for spraying our figures - it's a box from Amazon that I disassembled and then taped back together. It has a decently large staging area and adequate shielding on the 3 open sides. When I make up a foam base, I may want to trim the height of the walls down so that I can spray around all sides miore easily. Since the weather was turning cold, I decided to try priming just a couple of figures to test how well the primer will stick (and how my spraying technique will turn out). I chose two of the spider nest figures to start with - they're not only somewhat expendable since I have 6, but they're mostly flat so I expected it to be easy to hit all sides.
I used the priming techniques I read about, beginning the spray to the side and then sweeping quickly across the figure. I used about 3 coats, turning the piece once to hit all sides. I discovered that it's difficult to turn freshly primed pieces - since the solvent is supposed to be sticky, the piece sticks to the booth. Also, I don't want to touch it and remove the primer onto my hand (I think I ended up pushing them around with a straw). After the first coat of primer, I noticed that there were a lot of spaces between and underneath the spider figures in the nest that were not primed. With two pieces I decided to experiement a little. Piece #1 received a heavier spray of primer, intended to coat the cracks and spaces. Piece #2 received a lighter spray with no intention of coating the details. The final images are shown below. I realized afterwards that the primer filled in the details on Piece #1 like pouring glue into the cracks. Piece #2 turned out much better; at the time, I thought I saw a lot of the purple plastic molding showing through, but by the time I took these pictures the primer had flowed (?) over the details and provided a thin coat. It really does add up faster than you might think, so I'm glad that I started with pieces of which I have multiples. I'm waiting for the primer to cure and for a warm day to do some painting to see if the lighter primer coating holds the paint as well.