My Little Pony Miniatures: Glitter!

It's a lovely day for a Pony picnic!

From the left is Alfa with her sister Proxima.

In the center is Dazzle with her sister Razzle.

From the right are Brandy with her sister Meade.

Happy April Fools!

Seriously, these are paint experiments.  I got some glitter paints, I wanted to see how they looked on various materials, and I had all these My Little Pony blind bag miniatures gathering dust.  I picked out several miniatures I didn't like much, and I decided to turn them into custom-painted original characters.

First I wiped the miniatures down with cotton balls soaked in acetone; this removed their cutie marks and (gruesomely) their eyes, and hopefully any mold release and other coatings, as well as fingertip smudges.  Then I soaked them in soapy scalding water just to be on the safe side.  None of this appears to have damaged or marred the ponies' plastic surfaces, unlike what the acetone does to Reaper Black Bones miniatures.

Each My Little Pony blind bag miniature has a little LEGO-like peg hole in one of their feet; I'm not sure why, but it accomodates a 24X machine screw, so I used those instead of glue to attach the ponies to painting pedestals.

The blackish ones were originally opaque pastel colors; I primed them black to see how the glitter would look on black.  The others are all cast in translucent plastic with some glitter inside.  Then I primed all of these with Acrylicos Vallejo spray matte varnish .

The 1st pony of each pair got FolkArt Glitterific Silver acrylic paint, and the 2nd pony of each pair got FolkArt Glitterific Clear Hologram acrylic paint.  Their mane and tails got a second coat of these, but I can't really tell the difference.  The paint is thick, like petroleum jelly, but the glitter is dense enough that it still covers well.  I can only apologize for the photos; they really do not do these glitter paints justice.  However, the multicolor hologram-like sheen of the Clear Hologram paint is really spectacular.  Only the black figures (Alpha and Proxima) hint of the multicolor nature of these glitter paints.

Then they each got a coating of satin polyurethane varnish.  In retrospect, I should have used a gloss varnish; the satin varnish really mutes the colorful holo glitter reflections.

The 1st (black) pair and 3rd (orange & yellow) pair were glossy lacquered with spray lacquer I got at a hardware store.  The 2nd (pink & blue) pair was dull lacquered.

Then I glued on googly eyes.  Googly eyes make everything better.

I looked into tiny stickers to use for cutie marks (my wife calls them tramp stamps), but they would need to be smaller than 1/4" in order to fit on a tiny pony's flank, and I couldn't find any this small; plus I kind of felt like it was cheating.  So their tramp stamps are lame and poorly defined.

Although I am presenting this as an April Fool's joke because I usually paint Fantasy Role-Playing Game (D&D) miniatures from Reaper Miniatures, there are numerous connections between My Little Pony and Dungeons & Dragons; I blogged about this 8 years ago.  Now there is Ponyfinder, a rich collection of fan-published rules for playing various Pony characters, in various Pony races, fighting various Pony monsters, in the D&D-inspired Pathfinder RPG.  You can even buy special Ponyfinder miniatures, but I think it would be cheaper and more fun to get a blind bag My Little Pony miniature and repaint it.