Back in December when I was sick (I mentioned it in my first blog of 2024 http://radiantcomics.com/sitting-in-my-chair-getting-well/) I bought some Funko Pops with the purpose of repainting them. It was nothing I had ever done before but I got it in my head to give it a try. After about two months I finally did give it a try.
At first I was planning on stripping the original paint off the Pop and then using a white primer on it before I started painting it. Then I realized that was too much work for something that was just for fun and so that method was never going to happen. Finally this week I grabbed a Pop and used some heavy body titanium white acrylic paint to prime it. I just painted over the original paint since the heavy body white paint is pretty thick and covered well.
My original plan was to repaint the Pops with color but then I decided that was too much work and I was going to adapt my ink on paper monster drawing style to the Pops and make black and white monsters out of them. So I grabbed a brush and some black paint and tried it out. It was a miserable failure. My repaint looked terrible and I saw no way to make it good with just black and white so I grabbed some red paint and added that to the mix. That made it better but not good.
Over the last month or two I bought a couple of sets of acrylic paint pens specifically for drawing on Magic the Gathering cards. Another strange project of mine. Paint pens were the best medium for drawing on those cards so I bought two sets of twenty four pens. The first set has a bullet point and a bigger dot point. The second set has a bullet point and a brush tip (all these paint pens are two sided and have caps and tips on either side of the pen). I decided to try these out on the Pops too. Turns out that they work well. It’s acrylic paint over acrylic paint after all.
That set me off on a bit of an acrylic paint pen spree. I already had the two color sets plus I had a set of ten black paint pens that were sort of ball point pens and to those I added another set of twenty four paint pens that had a small bullet tip and brush tip. After that I bought another set of ten black paint pens that had the brush/small bullet tip combo. I have my eye on another set or two but that’s really it for now.
Luckily these paint pens are cheap. The sets of 24 colors only run about $15 and the sets of ten black pens run about $10. That’s somewhere around sixty cents a marker which is way cheaper than the $6 a marker I pay for alcohol based art markers. Paint pens don’t come with refills though.
I’m still working on repainting that first Pop. I don’t really have down what I want to do. I’m still in the messing around stage. I even want to figure out how to remove the toy’s big head so I can paint the body and head easier. There are instructions online and it takes a hair dryer or hot water but I haven’t tried it yet.
Another thing these paint pens are good for is painting on toy cars. Back in the late 1990s I used to collect 1:64 scale toy cars. Mostly Matchbox, Hot Wheels, and Johnny Lightning cars. At anywhere between $1 and $3 they were cheap to collect. Then I had too many of them and gave up collecting them. But then in 2006 I got the idea to paint them. I bought about twenty yellow Dodge Vipers from Matchbox and used Testors enamel modeling paint on them. I painted designs on about ten of them and they came out pretty cool and then that was the end of that.
As I was painting the Pops it struck me that the acrylic paint pens might work on Matchbox cars too. So I went out into my garage where all my old toy cars are and grabbed one of the yellow Dodge Vipers. The pens worked great on them. They actually worked better than the old Testors modeling paint because the pens were way more convenient and dried faster. Though I was just playing around with designs on the car it came out better than the Pop did. Probably because it wasn’t my first time painting on a toy car.
Now the main problem I have with painting the Funko Pops is what paint on them. A lot of people who repaint Pops make other characters or celebrities out of them. I don’t really have much interest in that. I think I just want to make them fun art pieces but I haven’t figured out what that means just yet.
Another problem I’m having is that I’m getting random cheap Pops, $3 to $4 a piece instead of $10 to $15 a piece, and the ones I get might not be the best ones for repainting. The one I’m starting with is the Bard from the show “The Witcher” and he is holding a guitar. What am I going to do with that guitar?
I also just bought another $3 Pop that is from some superhero movie and the woman is flying. She has a trail of plastic “Energy” behind her that acts like a stand so she can be in a flying stance. What do I do with that trail of “Energy?” Do I leave its along or paint it? I have no idea at this point. But I’ll figure it out.
I’m glad to have something new to figure out even if it is just a silly Pop painting project. I’ve been getting a lot of “Dreams of Things” covers done over the last couple of years and sometimes getting the same series done can get stale and repetitive even if I like the results. So it’s good to try something new even if I fail at it. And failure is always option when trying new things.