It’s the start of painting season at The Reptile House and I managed to complete one of two longstanding commitments today.
George’s blaster is built for fast paced, aggressive airsoft. It’s extremely light, due to the 11.5″ RS Noveske NSR and Project PTW custom length Dytac aluminium outer barrel. It has great balance and handles really well. Under the bonnet, the motor is Tac’d – so you know reliability comes as standard.
George was trusting enough to hand over his blaster, with the attitude that I could do whatever I wanted with the paint job…
I wanted to establish a 2014 version of my Big Net paint job, which would be a lot cleaner than the 2013 iteration on my M4.
Similarly, I didn’t want to rely on using a secondary, smaller net pattern to cover up my mistakes. This had to be a smooth, methodical one-take delivery. No thinking about it after the laborious planning stage, just doing it.
I’ve seen quite a few excellent Big Net patterns since I painted my M4 last summer, so I wanted to add a new twist: the pattern would be bolder and more splintered and angular. As such, the end product had to be something which made people second guess the technique I’d used.
Since my last stint at painting, my tastes have changed. It also turned out that my style had changed, too. I still only have the one style, though 🙂
There’s a lot of preparation work to do on a job like this, but once that’s out of the way the colours just fly on. We were blessed with a warm sunny day today, but I used a hair dryer between coats, to assure the finish stayed smooth and matt.
I started, as usual, with a base of Humbrol Dark Earth 29. Just one coat. It doesn’t really matter if it’s patchy, but I do like to make it as smooth and even as I can.
Next I laid my cargo net over the blaster, pulled it about a bit using various objects and sprayed through using Krylon and Halfords paints. Brown, Khaki, Sand, Green.
I’m pretty pleased with the result. I must admit I found it a stressful experience as it’s the first time I’ve sprayed a mate’s gun; it’s amazing how much more care I took over this than I did my own 🙂
The Reptile House 