Styrofoam Rock Formations

[Alcamtar]

Wow, there's something I never wouldn have imagined. Does that apply to all spray paints?

Latex paint is fine, and acrylic (water-based) should also work well. What you want to watch for is any paint that has a lacquer base. Also if you spray very light coats, even with a hostile paint, it will probably work okay -- the trick is to apply a coat so light that it dries before it can do any harm. Several such applications provide good coverage.

Bottom line: test the paint on a piece of scrap. Foam is not expensive, so experiment.

Mike

 

[Greatwyrm]

Thanks for the great info everyone.

Mark (or anyone else that may know), what is a good base to put on the styrofoam before spray painting it? Basilisk mentoned "gesso" but I've never heard of it.

Gesso is basically a kind of canvas primer. If you were going to paint something on a standard canvas, like a landscape or a portrait, you put a coat of gesso on the canvas first, then paint your picture on top of it. You should be able to find it at most art supply stores, like Dick Blick or Micheal's.

 

[Mark]

Be careful with the spray paints. Most of them are oil based. They use a form of paint thinner to keep the stuff thin enough to mist as it comes out of the can. Paint thinner of almost any sort will eat right through styrofoam.

My suggestion would be to get a quart of the cheapest, indoor flat finish latex paint your local store has. You should be able to cover a good deal more material and it will be easier to clean up.

Here's a link where the fella says that he uses a Flat Latex Spray paint...

http://people.delphiforums.com/sciano/display1.htm

 

[Zappo]

I once sprayed a big chunk of styrofoam with black paint, and it ate about half of it. What was left, though, had a weird shape that made for a way cool alien rock formation.

 

[JDragon]

Fun with Spray Paint & Styrofoam

Way back in Junior High I had a history project to do that we had to build something.

SO I decided to build a castle out of styrofoam.

Well I got it all built and then took it out back to paint, using a gray spraypaint.

Well as mentioned here, it started eating away at the walls of my castle.

So, I just changed the title of my project from Medevil Castle to...

Medevil Castle after Seige. Easily explaining away all the pock marks and hole the paint had cuased.

JDragon

 

[Prince Atom]

Slightly Apropos....

I have never crafted styrofoam rocks, but once about four years ago one of my fellow gamers was involved with a local elementary school production of The Hobbit and we all chipped in at one point to help her paint a crateful of styrofoam blocks, in various bright colors, to be Smaug's treasure.

It went really quickly, and I got my hands all covered in poster paint, and we shot the breeze about this wonderfully silly and naive game of Palladium Fantasy we played some time before, and before I know it, it's 2 am and my girlfriend keels over from exhaustion....

So, I have no tips aside from "Be prepared for a mess" and "It's best as a social task."

TWK
Random interludes with a really whiny guy....

 

[KnowTheToe]

I remember in Jr. High I figured out that nail polish remover melted it and I melted tons of it into the drain of my basement sink. Needless to say, the sink clogged with the grand daddy of blockage. I got into trouble. That is when I figured out it is better to play with chemicals and matches than chemicals and sinks.

 

[mmu1]

The thing I found worked pretty well if you had enough time (to wait for things to dry) was to use a lot of diluted Elmer's glue and a crapload of sand - it ends up sinking into the glue and makes for a nice, realistically rough texture. It also works really well if you want to do something like a layer of dust/fine debris along the base of a wall of a ruined building, or boulders buried in sand.

You can also do things like get a bottle of cheap Tempera paint, Elmer's glue, sand, and an old paintbrush you're not too attached to, mix the paint, glue, sand, and water, and paint it directly onto anything you might want to texture.

Oh, and about spray painting/hand painting - you'll always have to do some of the latter if you're looking for best results, because things with rough textures only end up looking good if you dry-brush them with at least a couple of pregressively lighter coats after painting on the base color.

 

[Zappo]

If you coat it well in Elmer's glue, do you think it would survive spraying?

 

[Tewligan]

Whoopsie - double post.