Project: Pony Repaints with Acrylic Paint Pens

Sup Dollect! Today I want to write about a big repainting project I did with some secondhand MLPs I got!

These ponies are from the MLP Mega Friendship Set. Their scary eyes frightened me, but the sculpt is cute. I wanted to repaint them in my art style.

I was inspired by xCanadensis’ video about using acrylic paint markers to repaint doll accessories and faces. I couldn’t find the exact same brand of markers where I live, but I think these Efimeso Acrylic Markers are basically identical to the ones in her video. 

I spent a lot of time cleaning them and trying to tame their hair, with mixed results. Their hair quality is really poor and I tried many treatments- boil washing, fabric softener, detangling spray, trimming the ends off, etc. Their hair still doesn’t look amazing. Some of them also have marker stains which I wasn’t able to scrub off.

Their faces proved powerfully resistant to my efforts to remove them. Acetone didn’t work. Their UV printing was mighty. I decided to work around their original paint, even though some of them had wonky placement. If anyone knows a better way to remove this type of face paint, please let me know!

First step was very creepy- whiting out their eyes! The acrylic paint markers had surprisingly good, thick opacity even after one layer! I reshaped some pony’s eyes, like Twilight and Fluttershy, to make them larger and correct some wonkiness. I was concerned about using up my white paint pen, so I did break out my Liquitex white acrylic paint to keep layering on more white.

 

Product photos showed accessories having painted details- in actuality they’re all solid colored. So I repainted these as well. I used black and gold Liquitex acrylic paint for the base coats and paint pens for the details.

I sketched where I wanted to place the iris and eye highlight and then began painting! I reshaped their eyelashes to match my art style. These pens dry fast which makes it easy to get a lot accomplished in one session!

I painted everyone’s hooves! For Celestia I used Liquitex gold paint, as on her crown, because the glittery gold paint pen was too watery to provide solid coverage.

I don’t usually draw black pupils on my ponies so I kept things very simple.

Finally I sealed everything with a thin layer of Liquitex Matte Varnish.

 

I’ve also been slowly using these paint pens to redo my OMG’s eyes. I had first attempted to repaint their eyes with just acrylic paint, but the results are so much smoother and easier with the paint pens. So I’ve been going back, taking off the old chunky acrylic paint, and redoing them with paint pens. I will make a post about my OMG repaints once I get them all done!

Here’s the final result! I’m really happy with how these turned out. I just need to recurl their hair- handling them so much while repainting messed their hair up.

I had fun using the acrylic pens. The only negative points were the limited range of colors and how some of the “fun” looking colors, like the glitter ones, are in practice too runny and thin to use. 

I’m curious to see how well these work for more detailed face repainting on fashion dolls. I have a Cave Club doll I’ve been saving to repaint into a Pinkie Pie custom. I want to try to use these markers for it! So I will report back on how that turns out, even if it’s a disaster, lol.