Can you paint figures with watercolors?

Water colours will just bead up on plastic, try it and see.

Prime them well and you should be ok.

miller,

Oils, Acrylics, enamels etc. all share a quality of being opaque particles of pigment suspended in a medium or binder of some sort. They lay down or adhere to the surface and are held there by the drying or curing of the suspension medium.

The difficult part with watercolors is that they are for the most part transparent (less pigment particles) and in this application, not as permanent. Their binder or suspension is really not for adhesion to hard, sealed surfaces. The mechanics of watercolors are that the pigment uses water for a suspension medium and that pigment becomes imbedded in the fibers of the paper or illustration board because of waterflow in and around those fibers. On a figure, there is no "fiber" other than the irregular surface created by minute particles of the primer that create a "tooth." While the color will sit on the surface of the primed object, it will not adhere and will easily come off over time. You will literaly be able to take a soft brush and remove the color.

The best bet would be a guache since it uses an organic binder that suspends more of the particles and will adhere (to a point) to a surface like primer. But only to a point. As the binder breaks down, so too will the adhesion characteristics of the guache. Making it fragile.

So....fiber or porosity (paper, wood, plaster, gesso, canvas, sand, stucco, spackle, leather, vellum) is needed for watercolors.

Smooth surfaces like plastic, resin, metal, glass, primers (acrylic, enamel) etc, can use paints that use something other than water to bind their color pigment to the surface.

More cool party trivia later......like, polar bears do not show up on infra red.
Happy New Year.

Mike

One point of clarifiaction is needed.

What exactly do you classify as Water-colours?

Many Garage/Figure Kit modellers I know use liquidex or similar paint for their Kits, this is a water-soluable paint that they airbrush onto their kits.
Granted not neccesairly classed as water colours, ie the colour that kids use in the class-room.

One of their reasons for using liquidex and similar is that they mix their own colours.

thanks for the explanation renarts, now I understand. I am sure I can still use them for shading and highlights, especially weathering as they are easy to control and easily fixed if you make a mistake, but I wont try and paint a figure with them.