Prop paint: prime, color, weather

Paint guide 🖌️ · Workshop crew · Nov 2026

The order

The app's build stages answer the paint question before the paint comes out: every element runs Patterned → Cut → Assembled → Primed → Painted → Rigged → Done. Priming sits before painting on purpose, color never goes on bare foam, bare resin or bare filament. And rigging comes after painting, so straps, lights and hardware get installed once the paint has had its time instead of getting fogged mid-pass.

The finish line of every prop paint job is the same four-beat the Weather Wash game drills: wash the seams, dry-brush, chip it, then seal. The wall's Props & weathering shelf says it as a sentence: paint is what makes new things look lived-in.

Prime before color

• What primer is: the sealing layer before paint, the workshop wiki's plain order of budget is Plasti Dip, gesso, or mod-podge. Plasti Dip is the rubbery coat that seals foam's pores; gesso does the same job for less.
• Light coats: 2–3 light coats beat one heavy one, heavy coats fill detail and build the drips you'll spend a session sanding out.
• Bendy parts: EVA flexes, so a rigid paint system cracks at every bend, prime with a flexible system before the color goes anywhere near foam. The full chain is in the EVA foam guide.
• Prints: printed props live inside the sand–prime–fill loop, the smoothing pass is the priming, and the rattle-can primer comes before base and the weathering washes.

Picking the color

The app's reference board has an eyedropper: pick a pixel off any reference photo and it comes out as a HEX/RGB swatch. The match does real color math, the swatch converts from sRGB to CIELAB under a D65 reference white, the built-in palette is ranked by ΔE76 distance, and the closest matches come back, five by default. No guess-by-name: the distance from your reference pixel to each palette entry is measured, not eyeballed.

The bundled palette holds 26 chart samples: 8 from the Vallejo Game Color chart, 8 from the Angelus standard chart, 4 from a Rust-Oleum Universal metallic brochure, and 6 from PlaidFX Smooth Satin. Read the app's own caveat before trusting any of them: these are approximate samples of chart artwork, not measured dried paint, and the engine deliberately leaves lighting, finish, substrate and metallic reflectance outside the comparison. Two of those (lighting and finish) are exactly what change at a con.

The plainy runs all the way down: every entry keeps its source and its sampling method, each color is the median of a small square patch read off the artwork, with the source and its hash saved so anyone can re-run the extraction. The six PlaidFX samples come from the 2020–2021 PlaidFX product catalog (pages 6–7), and the app names that historical catalog for what it is, it claims nothing about today's shelf availability. Your own samples become custom swatches: real records carried in full backups, deduplicated by brand, name and color on restore.

The coverage math

The app's paint & adhesive coverage tool refuses to know your paint. You enter the label coverage from the can or bottle you actually bought, per spray can or per liter of liquid, and the tool counts from there: the surface area, how many faces, how many applications. The 20% default overspray and absorption allowance sits on top of the area you're coating.

• Paint uses one face, the surface.
• Contact cement uses two faces, both bonding faces, because porous EVA can absorb extra.
• Coats vs jobs: "if coverage is per coat, enter coats; if coverage is for a finished coating, enter 1", the label decides what a coverage number means.
• Spray cans: label coverage may already represent multiple coats. Read the label, then test a sample, the tool's own exit advice.

Weather: wash, dry-brush, chip, seal

Weathering is the paint arts that age props, washes in recesses, dry-brush on edges, chips where stress would land (the wiki's one-line definition). The game puts the same chain in your hands, in order: a dark wash pools in the seam pockets, a dry-brush sweep catches the ridge's high edges, and one or two chips land by the edges, then the piece is sealed against a reference. The game's own scoring hint doubles as the bench rule: seams first, always.

• The metal chain (from the foam guide): black base → dry-brushed silver lifted onto raised edges → a translucent color glaze over the top. It's the same wash-and-edit logic at every scale.
• Locking it in: spray sealer after the metallics, and again after the weathering, the Worbla-vs-EVA finishing table's rule, which applies to any hard-wearing finish that's about to ride a con floor.
• Battle damage: the props shelf keeps a dry-brush-and-weathering tutorial and a battle-damage clip, chips at the edges, scuffs where grip and stress actually happen.
• Cloth, briefly: fabric takes its own aging pass, the sewing shelf's weathering-and-distressing-fabric clip sits beside the sewing guide.

What the sources don't carry

Plainly: the app and this site publish no brand-by-brand coverage tables, no thinning ratios, and no drying or recoat-times chart, the coverage tool stores no numbers at all, because contact-cement and paint coverage both vary by substrate and coat thickness. This guide stays out of those gaps on purpose. When a number matters, it comes off the current can; when a look matters, it comes off the wall, the shelf's weathering clips are the eye training, and the planner's hours column is where the paint sessions belong (the build log sheet, one line per session).

Fixes