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Airbrushed Camo Saiga


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Im gonna do this in a "step by step" fashion, so please dont post in between. Thanks!

 

Ive been airbrushing friends hunting rifles (and ARs) for years, I had the day off from work today, so I did my Saiga.

 

You can get an airbrush on Ebay for about $5 and use your car tires for air. If you have a compressor with a regulator thats even better. The paints are a few bucks each if you get them at a craft store. But an airbrush will spray just about anything, so use whatever kind of paint you feel comfortable useing on your rifle.

 

You dont have to use a high heat resistant paint because the color you are spraying is barely going to be a foggy mist coat. The clear protective coat that goes on when your finished is the important paint.

 

For the Saiga I am going to use a cheap single action airbrush with airbrush paints. Its running off a little roofing nailer compressor. The topcoat will be a clear acrylic lacquer with a few additives for heat resistance and chemical resistance. I should be adding a flattening agent to the clearcoat but Im out of it. So I will just have to scotch brite it when finished so its not glossy.

 

Here is the basic set up I am running for airbrush work.

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The first thing you want to do (obviously) is disassemble the rifle. Take off all the major components so that you can do a complete job without dark cracks along the lines of the rifle.

 

You can tape off the barrel end and reciever action. Also, make sure you do a thorough job taping off the lenses on your scope (if your doing the scope) And dont forget to include all the mags you want to use with the rifle.

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Edited by pistonring8
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Next, you should take everything not attached to the reciever / barrel and scrub it down really good with a ScotchBrite pad and dish soap. Dont do this to your scope :rolleyes: And take apart the magazines. You will not need the guts or floorplates for any of this. Only the mag bodies should be painted.

 

When finished, the parts need to be dried and sanded very well. The plastic that these parts are made out of is impregnated with oil, if they are not totally striped and cleaned, the paint will not stick. Also, sand your metal parts just enough to give the new paint something to stick to. Make sure your metal parts are completely free of oils and are rough enough to allow adhesion.

 

Dont sand them down to the bare metal. The black paint on the Saiga metal is a great primer that withstands high temps and abuse. Without the black paint barrier between the steel and the airbrush paint, you could have problems.

 

 

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I used 600 grit wet for the plastic and metal parts.

 

Once that is finished, make sure all pieces are completely dry and wiped down clean.

 

You might want to use rubber gloves from here until your finished so that you dont leave finger (skin) oils on the areas to be painted. I dont. But your supposed to.

 

Lay out the rifle in the way that it would be together. Stand back and take a look at the long straight horizontal lines. You want to break that up. You want to hide thoes lines and shadows, and make fake vertical lines and shadows instead. That will mimic what you would see in the forest.

 

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With masking tape (or whatever) make yourself some vertical and angled lines that cover all of the components of the rifle.

 

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For example, instead of just crossing the reciever. Angle the line to cross the reciever, scope and mag. Try to cross lines where the pieces meet. The idea is to blend the stock into the reciever, the mag into the reciever, the foregrip into the scope.....etc.

 

Now we are ready to start painting!

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Ok, heres the part thats different for everybody depending on:

 

(1) Where you are in nature most frequently with your rifle

(2) What your surrounding nature looks like (Woodland, Desert, Field, Urban, Winter, Grassland...etc.)

 

Time of year is very important. Ever go out in the woods in July wearing fall camo? Or vice versa. You look like a Christmas tree all lit up with yellows, orange and reds. The shapes are good for breaking up your body shape, but the colors never seem right around this area.

 

I live in the mountains of Pennsylvania. I can find greens, browns and greys all year long. But Mossy Oak or Real Tree only looks right in certain areas and only at certain times of the year. I need something that will blend in general with my area and break up the lines of the rifle to the viewer.

 

So this is how Im going to do it. I start with a yellow (yes, yellow) because it is easy to see on black for this layout and it will be mostly covered by other colors. And it adds depth behind the darker colors you are going to use.

 

 

 

You dont just want to break up the horizontal lines, you also want to add as much depth as possible to the surface. That way it will be broken of a rifle shape on all dimentions.

 

So you start by just fogging the edge of the tape all the way around. Try to make them connect on the other side, but its no big deal if you dont.

 

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Lock each mag into place and trace the yellow line onto it so that they will all match the rifles camo pattern properly.

 

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Then I removed the tape and traced over all of the yellow lines with a greenish turquoise freehand. Now the lines are straight, but not perfectly straight and very bright green.

 

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This part is fun. I usually freehand the leaves and twigs and bark. But in the spirit of education Ill show you a neat trick.

 

Go out and pick some nice live leaves that you think would look most common to your area. (Leaves of three, let them be!) If your looking for tree leaves, find a little sapling that has tiny leaves so they dont overpower your camo job. I like to find the ones that are distinctly shaped. Like Maple, Oak or Chestnut.

 

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I use a can of spray primer over card stock. Paper will work just fine, but it gets flimsy when you paint it. Hold on to the stem or tip of the leaf with your finger so you dont blow them away, and spray over the leaves.

 

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Then, cut them out with an exacto knife. Now you have stencils. Save both parts because you will need the little cutouts to make shadows. Dont worry if your cutouts dont look much like leaves, you want to blur them up on the camo job anyway.

 

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Now, just hold your stencil up to the rifle wherever you want a leaf, and spray it on there. I try to put leaves between pieces to better hide the transition. If you put a leaf between the mag and reciever, make sure you lock in each mag and spray it the same so that they all match.

 

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I am still useing a rediculously bright turquoise color. Ill tell you why (besides the same reasons for the yellow) when we are almost finished.

 

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Use as many or as little as you think you should. I vary leaf patterns from rifle to rifle. If you hang out in mostly dense areas then go nuts with the leaves. Im going to take it easy.

 

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On my Saiga, I want a good all around camo. I could do a specific camo that would dissapear in one area but would not be as effective in another. So Im going to use some brown for ground and low shrubs. Then a dark grey for standing woods.

 

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I filled in about half of the lines with brown.

 

This camera is funny, it doesent make much of a distinction between grey and black. But it will pick a camo rifle out of the woods quicker than shit. :lolol:

 

I show people pictures of camo rifles that I did and they look like they stand out. But with the naked eye, they blend in quite well. Anyway, here is the grey.

 

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I dont use a specific formula for mixing colors. To make brown, I mix a drop of blue and a drop of green into a bunch of orange. I take it outside or use a referance picture to tint it. Yellow with a little white to go lighter and either blue or green with maybe just a drop of black to go darker.

 

I filled in the rest with grey. Careful not to cover the leaves.

 

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Now I take my stencils and leaf cut outs and lightly fog black to the underside of all the leaves. This will give you a little bit of depth to your pattern.

 

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I lay a straight piece of card stock (the edge of my stencil) along all of the brown lines and spray black along the edge. More shadows. More depth.

 

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While your doing this, take some black and "splatter" it along the brown. You can make good splatter by turning down your air pressure to almost nothing, or holding an object near the spray tip while your painting. If your new to airbrushing then you have probably already been splattering.....lol This will give you little dots at random intervals that gives the illusion of texture. It also helps to break up any solid colors.

 

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Ok, now what we have is a really bright cartoon kind of camo. If you are relitively artistic, now is the time to detail your treebark, veigns in the leaves, bugs, waterdrops, skulls, flames....etc. Most woodland camos have lightly colored thin branches that criss cross at random intervals. I dont know why. I dont use them on mine. I am trying to gently break up the rifles shape, not draw attention to its vertical lines. If you like them, use them.

 

At this point, I go outside and hold the rifle up to the woods out back. I might stick it in a tree, I might lay it on the forest floor. I want to try and get the coloring toned down to blend in smothly with the forest. It is harder to make colors lighter than it is to make them darker.

 

So I go back in the house and lightly fog a little black over everything. Then come outside and look at it compared to the forest again. In, out, in, out, until it starts to look similar to the shades of colors in the woods.

 

I used a transparent green over the turquoise, and a solid green on the edges of the leaves. Transparent (candies) paints are cool to work with because you can cover with one coat and still see the underlying color, or use several coats to cover it all the way up to a solid color.

 

Now that I fogged black all over my detail, I want to make sure that my vertical lines and leaf shapes still do thier job of breaking up the rifles shape.

 

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So I take the rifle outside and step away, and look. Then I go inside and goof around for awhile, and come back out in a few minutes and look. Its ok, but I think it needs something. Im still not sure if I need more detail or not. So I take a picture of the rifle (this camera will point it right out!) and look at it in black and white.

 

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Its close, but needs a lighter color over all of that darkened area. So I mix a little beige and give it a little fog along the same lines I painted brown. Looks good. Now I can go over it with clearcoat, rub it down and reassemble.

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I hung up all the parts, taped off everything that does not get painted (I should not have to list everything you shouldent paint) And sprayed it all with a mist coat of clear. once it got tacky, I went over it again with a mist coat, then again. If we were painting Cobra76two's car we would dump the clear on with a smile, but we want a matte finish over the clear, so in this case overspray is our friend!

 

Remember that clearcoat always darkens your colors a little bit (like they were wet) So take that into account when you are matching your colors. Try to go a shade or two lighter. Clearcoat also acts like a magnifying glass on mistakes. It will amplify the smallest imperfection. Rattle can clear coats, urothanes, enamels and laquers all do it.

 

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Once all the parts were dry (I use a quick dry reducer) I layed everything out. I put the mags back together. Then reassembled the rifle.

 

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Like I said before. For some reason this camera will point right at a camo rifle in the woods. So yea, it doesent really look like its blended in very well. But in person it looks pretty good. I dont know how to turn the flash off on this camera, so all the pics will have a glare off the fresh clearcoat. I will have to scotchbrite it out and take another pic in a few days.

 

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When your matching your colors, make sure you do it in full sunlight. If you airbrush your rifle on a cloudy day, it will look totally different in full sun. If you can, drag your air compressor out into the woods and work with the sun over your shoulder and the forest all around you. That would be cool!

 

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The paint was still a little tacky, so I decided to bake it on! :super:

 

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Oops! I forgot to add a "before" and "after" pic.

 

I would love to see other people post pics of thier airbrushed camo. Next time I will try to take pics when I spray an "Urban" or "Grassland" camo. I would like to get a spare set of furniture for "Winter" camo. Maybe Ill do a post on that.

 

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