Alexzandria Art : Priming My First Mannequin

Hello!

It's been a very busy time for me so I am going to try to back date what I have been doing over the past while with a few blog posts this week. I am three weeks off having to do my presentation before Christmas, also my dissertation is due soon! So I am juggling a lot of things right now, it's all happening!

I got my first mannequin at the start of October, I quickly began experimenting with how I would go about priming it!

Mannequin head with blob

Fully assembled the mannequin appears to be floating

One thing about the mannequin that at first made priming it quite an obstacle was the many different textures and types of plastic it was made up of.

my first attempt at priming the hand

I didn't do any research into how to go about priming plastic but I already had white acrylic paint, which in the past I've used as a primer on numerous occasions. So I gave that a bash but I was not surprised that it didn't take to the plastic and it pealed right off as soon as it was dry, as you can see bellow.

The paint pealing off the plastic arm

I then started researching how to properly prime and turn a shiny plastic surface into a matte paintable one. It turns out you can buy spray on plastic primer, that kind of works like a spray paint however it adheres to what are usually very difficult to paint surfaces, such as shiny plastics and metals

With one coat of primer

This worked perfectly, So I sprayed the entire mannequin with it , at first with just one coat and left that to dry

With one coat of primer

The mannequin has glass eyes I did not want to ruin, so I covered them with tissue and primed the head

I also primed the metal stand.

Then I sprayed the mannequin with a second coat.

With two coats

With two coats of plastic primer

I then decided in order to get the best results and vibrancy in colour, when I start to paint the mannequin, I needed to add a third coat. The third coat I used was a canvas primer, which I painted the entire mannequin with.