Paint Your First Custom Art Toy | with Jessica Esper

1. Profile | Jessica Esper: [MUSIC] 2. Class Introduction: Let's paint your very first vinyl toys. In this class, you'll learn the whole process, everything from sketching, to painting, to little tips and tricks along the way. I'll even show you where to buy your blanks, what supplies you'll need and even how to get inspiration. By the end of this class, you'll feel confident enough to paint your very own vinyl toys. I can't wait to see you in class. 3. Supplies : You're going to need a few things before we get started. First up on the list is buying your vinyl toy, otherwise known as a blank. They ranged widely in price. You can get them for $10 or you can pay hundreds of dollars. It just really depends on how limited the figure is. One of the most popular and I think probably well known is the Munny. You can buy a Munny at kidrobot.com, eBay, Amazon, and sometimes you could even get them on craigslist. Just do a Google search for DIY vinyl toy. You'll quickly see that there are hundreds, if not thousands to choose from. So you can do a search for a Munny, a Dudebox, or even an Android, which is what I'll be painting in this class. Androids can be a little tricky to paint because there's a lot of areas that are hard to get to, including this gap that's in between the head and the body. You can actually heat up the vinyl to make it soft and then the head will come off, but it's still pretty hard to do. I would go with something a little bit easier to paint, like a Munny. Another thing to consider is the size of the toy. The larger your toy is, the more room you have for error. So I would actually recommend starting out with something a little bit bigger rather than small. The next thing is you'll need are a HB pencil, a pencil sharpener and the most important thing is a gum eraser. You'll need these to sketch the design onto your toy. Next, you're going to need your paint. I always use acrylic paint. One of my favorites is golden. I really like it because it's very fluid and you don't have to mix it. It's already ready to go. The downside is it's pretty expensive. The Martha Stewart brand would probably be my second favorite and Americana, FolkArt and Liquitex are my third. These four are pretty much in the same price range. You can pick these up online or at your local craft store. If using a brush isn't your thing, you can always use a paint marker. You can get pretty precise with these, but the downside is that they don't get into the little cracks and crevices that some of the toys have. These markers can get pretty expensive too. I prefer using brushes for the majority of the painting. The markers are really good for outlining, but the brushes can do both. So if you want more bang for your buck, definitely go with the brushes. The ones I use a lot are the filbert and the round. The large round brush lets you get big thick lines. The small round brush gets the really fine details. I use the filbert for blocking in big areas of color. The rounded edge distributes the paint and a little bit more evenly. Next you want to get some varnish. Now, you can skip this step. You don't have to varnish it. It basically just protects it and I think it makes the colors look better. I like to use a high gloss varnish. Make sure the brush you use for applying varnish inexpensive. Eventually it'll ruin your brush. If you take care of your brushes, they last a really long time. Acrylic is easy to clean off your brush as long as you do it quick enough. You don't want it to dry it into the bristles. All you need is warm water. Soap is optional and if you use soap, you want to use something that isn't too strong. The Masters Brush Cleaner is a good option and it lasts a really long time. If you have a lot of paint on your brush, you're going to have to clean your water more frequently. I like to use a larger water container. That way you don't have to switch out my water as often. One thing that'll really help you with painting is to figure out a drying system. I made this handy-dandy drying rack out of two-by-fours, clips, wire and an dowel rod. I've even seen people punch holes into foam instead of wood. Now that you have all your supplies, we can start doing our design. I'll show you how in the next class. 4. Design: Every great design starts with a solid idea. I find that there are a few common themes in my artwork. I always seem to gravitate towards sugars schools, patterns, plants, lettering, and sea creatures. So my work is very major inspired. That makes a lot of sense because I spent a lot of my childhood growing up in Hawaii. I'm also a nature photographer, I do a lot of macro shots of bugs and close up of leaves and textures. So I can see how this would inspire a lot of my artwork. The basis of my line work actually stems from nature. Like the hard angles of a broken rock or the soft curves of a mushroom, or even the twists and turns of an old tree branch. The colors of a butterfly, it could be my entire color scheme for a toy design. These are all things that I find really inspiring. Another cool way to find inspiration as by listening to music that you really like. To start doodling something on paper, anything that goes with the music, you'd be surprised at what you come up with. If you're still having trouble finding inspiration, I would go to Pinterest. Pinterest as a really good resource because you can find a lot of things that you like just by finding one thing that you like. For example, if I find a picture added to my board, it's going to give me more examples of things similar to that picture. Once you have your board together, you'll realize that there's a reoccurring theme. Maybe you'll have a lot of Astro photography, like stars and planets, distinct galaxies. This is actually really good for vinyl toys and I've done a few myself, or maybe you'll find that your board is just filled with handbags and designer shoes. But take a closer look, just because it's not totally unrelated, doesn't mean that you can't get inspiration from it. Maybe all the shoes and bags that you found all have patterns. Maybe everything is black and white and you can use that to your advantage by having no color in your toys. I think you get the idea, just keep an open mind. Sometimes it's hard to start painting straight out of your head, to make things easier, I usually sketch out an idea. You can do this directly on your toy or you can do it on paper. This project was for a client that was in the United States Air Force Thunderbirds. He was the crew chief of one of the pilots. Since I only had one jet headdress and really didn't have another way to get another one. I didn't want to risk does painting directly on it. I put the headrest on a large piece of paper and I traced around it to get the outline of the head rest. This gave me a template to work with. From there and could easily just sketch out my ideas onto the template, and I wasn't afraid to mess up because I knew I would have an unlimited amount of templates to work with. Once I came up with a design that I really liked, I inked it in, during this step, actually made it a lot easier to paint directly on the headrest. Because from here I could see based on the sketch, that the center of the headrest would have the head of the bird, the middle of the scroll, and then the bottom tail area. Then the two sides would have the tips of the wings and then the tips of the scroll areas with the names. You can apply this same technique to vinyl toys. Just use your sketch to help guide you through the process of where you need to put things. Sketching directly on the toy is a little bit more challenging. So I'm going share a couple of tips that I use to help me with the process. Before starting your sketch on your custom toy, you want to make sure it's really cleaned. The oil from your fingers will get on the toy and it'll make it hard for the paint to stick. All you need to do to clean the toy is used mild soap and water and make sure it's thoroughly dry. Make sure that your hands are clean, too. When sketching things like a face, it's really important to have a middle reference point. This will help keep the feature symmetrical. I do this by drawing a straight line down the center of the toy. I know I'm going to have ford teeth, so two teeth need to be on either side of this line. I ended up joining the teeth too small, so I just use my eraser and gently erase the lines. Make sure that you wipe the excess eraser bids off, and then I redraw. Repeat these steps as many times as you need to until it's exactly how you want it. If your design isn't symmetrical, you can just skip this middle line step. As I add the rest of the features, I keep referencing that middle line. Now that I have my design the way I want it, I'm going to go back over it a little bit darker so I can see it better. For the rest of the design, I'm just going to keep using that middle line as my reference point and just mere everything until I'm done with the sketch. Now that we're done with the sketch, we can start painting. I'll show you how in the next lesson. 5. Practice Techniques : Before you dive right in, it's really important that you get familiar with painting. We're going to start off here by practicing on this little mini munny. I like to have a couple extra toys on hand just in case I want to try new techniques or use new materials, especially if you don't want to practice on your really nice toy that's expensive. If your paint is a little bit chunky, you definitely want to add water to it. This will make it a more fluid consistency and it'll be easier to glide the paint along the toy. Look how many lines I'm painting without having to re-dip my brush. This is because I added a little bit of water to it. It's really important that you practice painting on a toy surface and not on paper. It's a whole different experience painting on a three-dimensional surface. You can see on my brush that I barely use any paint. If you see a little blob at the end of the tip, then you know you have way too much paint. If your lines don't look that good starting out, it's okay, because in the beginning my lines looked really, really bad. Don't be so hard on yourself. Just remember every time you paint you get better. The more you practice, the easier it's going to be. I'm going to go ahead and switch brushes. This is the small filbert brush. I use this for blocking in larger areas of color. The nice thing about black is that you only need two layers to make it a really solid dark black. Before doing the second layer, you want to make sure that the first layer is thoroughly dry, which usually takes a couple of minutes. You want to work pretty quick because this paint dries really fast. Now, you don't want to sacrifice quality, but you do want to make sure that you're going quick enough so that the paint isn't drying as you're brushing, because if that happens, then you're going to get texture and that's not going to look good. You can get thin and thick lines with the same brush just by turning it as you move across the toy. Now I'm going to show you how I use the round brush. This is one of my favorite brushes because you can get really nice line variation. See how the beginning of the line is really thin, it goes thick and then as you ease up at the end it goes thin again. You can get really detailed small lines or thick lines. I'm going to show you a few examples using the Montana paint marker. This is what it looks like when you use the pen. You can see that it's not very consistent. There are some areas that have not enough paint and some that have too much paint. I've had a few incidents where the pen just exploded on my toy and it ruined it. I'm going to show you the difference between using the pen and using the brush side-by-side, so you can get a real feel of what each one looks like. One thing I like about using the pen is that it's really quick. It's definitely a lot faster than having to dip your brush into the paint and then the water and going back and forth between that, you just literally just draw right on it, everything comes out as long as it doesn't explode on you, then everything is good. A drawback to the pen is definitely the fact that you can't get into little crevasses like in between this neck and the body or in between the fingers. There are some places where you just can't get the paint to come out because it's not a flat enough surface. Now, I'm going to make a couple of lines with the pen and a couple of lines with the brush and I want to know if you can see the difference. The clear winner here to me is definitely the brush. You can see the overall quality of the line where it just look so much cleaner, and even the pigment is just a lot more of a rich black. The first layer of paint on the ear is already dry. We've only been painting a couple of minutes, but as you can see, it definitely need another coat of paint. I think the best part about painting is going through that learning process, where in the beginning you do the first coats and you're doubtful about whether or not it's going to look good, and you're maybe contemplating stopping, but then you persevere, you push through it, you keep going, and then you finish everything, and in the end it turned out perfect or very close to perfect. You always learn something and I think that's what you should take away from every toy that you paint. Now that you're a little bit more familiar with painting, we can move on to the real project. 6. Painting: Now you're ready for the fun part, painting. First, you're going to need your paints. For this purpose, it doesn't matter if you use satin or gloss because we're going to be varnishing at the end and it'll all look the same. If you decide not to use varnish at the end, then you should pick either all satin, or all gloss. This will ensure that your toy looks consistent. Before you start painting, you want to make sure your paint is mixed up properly. Otherwise, your paint could be really watery or too thick. I always put down a little bit more than what I mean just because it'll stay moist longer than if you have a little tiny speck of pain. Adding water also helps. Make sure when you're blending your water into your paint that it doesn't go past the bristles. This will help keep your brush clean and it'll last longer. Now for the scary part. No, i'm just kidding. It's the fun part. It is a little daunting when you first start this because you've never done it before. Just remember this is your first toy and it's okay if it doesn't look perfect. When painting, it's imperative that you don't have too much paint on your brush. Ultimately, what you want to do is build up the layers until you get the color you want. Each layer you put down is going to look better than the last. Just keep that in mind as you're painting [MUSIC]. While i'm painting, i'm thinking ahead. When I paint in this red, for example, you can see that I'm leaving a gap in between the shapes. I'm leaving room for the other colors. Since i'm using the Filbert brush, I can block in the colors a lot faster, but i'm sacrificing the details. If you really want to get in there and be more perfect with it, then you would use a smaller round brush that would allow you to get into those little cracks. Now that i'm finished with the red and we're going to go ahead and switch colors. First you want to make sure your brushes, they're really cleaned. Then i'm just going to take a paper towel and blot it to see if there's a little bit of paint coming out. That's how you can make sure that it's really clean. Now i'm going to switch over to this orange color. It's called wild salmon. I'm just going to start blocking in the areas around the red, but still leaving space for my third color. It's easier to have a general idea of how you want the colors laid out before you start. You don't have to remember how many layers you're putting down. You just want to keep looking at it. If you still see spots where you can see through to the toy, then you know you need to add more paint to it. I'm going to speed up the video now so we can get to the next color [MUSIC]. I'm going to take a break from painting the pattern and start doing the body color. I noticed that many androids are not a bright white and that's what I want. I'm going to go ahead and paint over the toy color. When you're using a really light color, it doesn't cover the pencil marks. You want to make sure that those are erased before you paint over it. I'm not worried about the other pencil marks because I know i'm going to go back over it with the black paint and you won't see it. The difficult part about painting Androids is this little gap in between the teeth and the chin area. It's really hard to paint there. I highly recommend if you're new to painting toys that you don't start out with painting an Android. I would start with something a little bit easier, like a money. Now you can see here that I've just painted over the pencil marks. That's because I just realized that it's probably going to be easier if I paint over it and then use the darker color on top of the white. Now i'm going to switch over to the final color. This one is called beach glass. It's really pretty and I use it in a lot of my toys. Now, i'm just keeping in mind that i'm actually going to use white in the pattern as well. I want to leave some room for that [MUSIC]. Once you have one layer of paint for all of the colors, you're going to switch over and do the second layer. You can see already it looks way better. You're going to do as many layers as you need to get the result that you want with the color. The trick is to make sure that it's thin enough so that you get a really flat consistency with the paint. If you don't want it to be chunky or textured, you want it to be really smooth [MUSIC]. Now i'm going to paint the first layer of white onto the pattern. You can see that the edges of my design look a little bit fuzzy and they're not that clean. That's okay because i'm going to go over it with the black in the end. To make painting a little easier, i'm going to go ahead and remove the arms. The antenna actually come out too and they're a little bit hard to hold and paint. I'm going to show you a method that I use to help me hold the little small things while I paint. This is a wooden dowel rod with a clip attached to it using a wire. I got these materials for under $10 and took the wire and wrapped it around the dowel rod and then twisted it until it was connected to the clip. The bottom part of the dowel rod is what I use to insert into a piece of wood that has a hole drilled in it so that I can easily just set it down into the wood while it's drying. This is what the drying stand looks like. It's just two-by-fours glued together with holes drilled in it. Make sure the brush you're using is the appropriate size for what you're painting. If I use a brush, those too small, you would see a lot of the brush strokes and I wouldn't be able to paint it fast enough to get a smooth finish. If the brushes too big, then I'm really restricted when it comes to the small areas. Sorry for the camera we work with here. I kept having to move my hand to get good angles and my camera couldn't focus. I like to use the fill brush for this because it hides the brushstrokes. Another reason I don't recommend starting with an Android is because you have to take these little antenna out and then you have these holes on top of the head. It's really easy to get paint stuck inside of there. I'm just going to continue painting the body. Now it's time for the hardest part of painting. Outlining, I switch to my round brush so I can get really fine details. It's crucial that you're comfortable when you're painting so that you don't mess up. Then, like I said before, the larger the toy, the easier it is to paint. Holding this little Android still is pretty hard. As I was saying before, it's really hard to paint in between the head and the body of the Androids. As you can see right here and mess I up. If you're quick enough, you can actually use a paper towel that's damp and blot the paint area and wipe it off, which is what I did right here. But if you wait too long then it doesn't work. But don't worry, there's another way we can fix it. The other method is just going to be to paint over it. Now it's going to take a couple layers but in the end it's going to look like it never happened. You can see I have another little mess up around the mouth and I'm just going to follow the steps that we took last time to fix the other mistake. I'm going to need to add a couple more layers for that to look good. But in the meantime, I'm going to start doing the design around the eyes. I'm using my round brush and I'm putting a little bit more paint on the brush so that when I dot, it makes a nice circle. You just have to be careful not to use too much paint because then you might accidentally touched something that you don't want to paint. Now using my black with the round brush, I'm going to go ahead and paint the design on the forehead. When I go to paint my next color on top of the black, I'm going to wait until it's dry enough so that it doesn't smear when I paint. Now with my round brush, I'm going to go ahead around the pattern and do a dot design. This is a really easy way to add detail without having a lot of experience. It just adds that final touch to make it look finished. I like to add dots around the design until it looks balance. Just to give my design a little bit more detail, I'm adding a few lines for this design. I just want to paint the tubes. Now to wrap everything up, you just have to add your signature. I like to use the small round brush for this. Now the only thing left to do is to varnish. I'll teach you how in the next class. 7. Varnish: Varnishing helps to protect your toy in the long-term. Varnish will eventually ruin your brush. So for this reason, I like to use brushes that are very expensive. The brand I use is called Liquitex. It comes in a gloss, matte and a satin finish. Before using it, you want to make sure it's mixed up. You do this by slowly tilting it back and forth a couple times. Make sure you don't shake it because it's not the same as paint, it'll get bubbles and you definitely don't want that. When using varnish, you want to remember a little bit goes a long way. Even though it takes three hours for it to dry, it starts setting up right away. You can see on my brush that I only dip it in until it's about halfway up the brush. When varnishing, you definitely want to have very thin coats. If you put too much varnish on the brush, it'll drip, and unless you go over immediately, it's going to stay there and it'll dry like that. Even after you're done varnishing and you put your toy down to dry. If you notice that it starts to drip because of gravity pulling it down, you don't want to go over it again because that will actually make it worse. Make sure it's very important that you don't put too much varnish. This is the first coat is done and it looks a little bit glossy, but it's going to look a lot glossier on a second coat. The more layers you put, the glossier it's going to be. Now as soon as you're done varnishing, you want to clean this brush with soap and water. If you don't in a couple hours, it's going to be raw card and your brush will be totally ruined, then you won't be able to use it again. After your second coat of varnish, the last step is going to be to put the arms back in. Before doing this, you'll want to make sure your toy is completely dry. If you don't, then you're going to leave finger marks on the varnish, and there you have it. You're finished android, and now it's your turn. I can't wait to see the toys you guys paint. Happy painting. Be sure to leave me a comment and let me know what video you want me to make next. If you want to get updates on my work, follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.