[Watchmaking] EP.7 Painting a watch dial - Acrylic Paint

The most easily you readily available paints are acrylic paints. It's easy and cheap to get a wide range of colors, you can mix them to create any color you want, and best of all, you don't have to worry about the paint chipping off because it's very hard when it dries.

If you're a good painter, you can even use your watch dial as a canvas with a fine paintbrush to create some amazing artwork. But unfortunately, I'm not a good painter at all.


I just wanted to paint the acrylic paint evenly on the watch dial. No matter how good you are, it's not easy to paint a surface evenly with a brush. Spraying is a little better option. After diluting the acrylic paint properly, you can spray it with an airbrush. However, acrylic paints tend to have large particles, so you'll need a good, powerful airbrush compressor, and if you have an airbrush, lacquer paints might be a better choice.


Since I didn't have an airbrush at the time, I had to figure out how to evenly apply the acrylic paint to the watch dials. After some searching, I found a technique for painting scale models with acrylic paint that involves using a sponge instead of a brush. This technique involves dipping and applying acrylic paint with a very fine-grained sponge, and cosmetic puff sponges have very fine-grained that allow for a smooth application.


Below are the acrylic paints and puff sponge I used.



And here's the result.



Well.........

It didn't turn out as well as I had expected.

The puff sponge allowed me to apply the paint much more evenly and thinly than I could with a brush, but it didn't bring out the colors of the paint enough. The yellow dial was supposed to be vivid, but it didn't look like that at all. (In retrospect... I think a glossy varnish finish would have brought out the color.)


Anyway, I wasn't happy with the results and ended up buying an airbrush.



From the next post, I'll talk about painting with airbrush!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

[Watchmaking] EP.8 Painting a watch dial - Tools for Airbrushing Lacquer Paint

Image
Spraying seems to be the best way to paint surfaces evenly and neatly. However, spray paint cans have the disadvantage of having to buy new cans every time I want a new color. The alternative to spraying paint is to use an airbrush. An airbrush is a device that sprays paint with the pressure of a compressor. You can use lacquer paint or acrylic paint, and while lacquer paint is toxic and should be used with caution, it is easy to spray with low pressure and has the advantage of a smooth surface. A small 10ml bottle of lacquer paint for modeling hobby costs about $3. Since what I'll be painting is a small watch dial, about 3 centimeters in diameter, the small size is a big plus. You can also mix the paint to create the colors you want. In this post, I'll show you what tools I used to airbrush the dial. Spray booth When you use an airbrush, paint overspray is floating in the air. Inhaling this can be very bad for your health. Inhaling paint, not only well-known toxic lacquer pain
Read more

[Watchmaking] EP.13 Making a full lume dial - Planning

Image
 I previously posted about dials made with UV printing. ( link ) The dial on the right is the one that I made the watch with, and you can see the circular scratch in the center. This is where the dial touched the hour hand. There were two problems with the dials I made at the time - The metal dial base was 0.5mm thick, and I didn't thin it down. - It was bent instead of flat (ordered from laserboost, see previous post ). Moreover, the watch was powered by the quartz movement which made the watch constantly run, and one day I took it out of the watch box and there was the scratch like this. So I decided to make a new dial. At the time, I was a little tired from all the trial and error with the yellow diver watch . I wanted to do it in an easier way this time. One easy way to print a dial is to use a decal. (see previous post ) Think of it as applying a clear sticker, but decals are much thinner and have tighter fit than stickers. So far, I've been using a custom laser-cut meta
Read more

[Watchmaking] EP.11 Adding color to the watch lume

Image
The last time I made a watch dial with UV printing( link ), I wasn't happy with the lume. When I designed the watch dial, I wanted the watch hour index to be white, but it wasn't as white as I had hoped. There are many different colors of lume powders on the market. The brightest and longest lasting are green (like C3), followed by blue (like BGW9). The lume power glowing blue looks white in sunlight. Of course, I also used the powder that glows blue , but it didn't look as white as I wanted it to when I actually applied. Perhaps if I had applied the lume over a white base, it would have looked white, but the method I used was to fill the holes with lume paste, so it didn't look that white. (for more information, please see previous post ) After some thought, I decided to mix in some white lacquer paint when I mixed the lume powder with the binder. I thought that the non-transparent lacquer paint would make the lume less bright than the transparent binder alone, so I tr
Read more