When I was a kid I loved action figures; they’d be strewn about the house in forts, I would fashion parachutes to some and launch them with homemade slingshots, things like that. But of course as I got older I started to appreciate them more as an artistic medium. I saw a lot of them sculpted with exquisite details and then those details were shoddy or completely ignored in the painting process. The first time I tried touching up some of those figures I used Testors enamel paint and it never dried, but I never forgot about them.

Over the years that followed I would periodically try different approaches at cleaning up the figures and rarely did it work. I went so far as to find vinyl paint (it’s the paint they use to paint them in factories) but the only kind I could find commercially available wasn’t a good consistency for brushing (its primary use was for painting fishing lures and was some of the most toxic stuff I’ve worked with). Every approach ended in failure. The chief problem appeared to be various paints’ inability to completely dry on all surfaces.

I found an old bottle of a paint laying around in a box one day. The paint was supposedly for working with ceramic figures and things like that, but it was something I hadn’t tried so I figured what the heck. To my great surprise it dried (and dried fast) and did exactly what I wanted it to do! A little experimentation later and I had the complete workings of something I’d been searching on how to do, off and on, for literally more than 15 years.