Well I finally achieved a matte finish, the key was EXTREMELY LIGHT coats of the matte paint mixture. I did this overtop of an existing glossy finish and also built up a color entirely with EXTREMELY LIGHT coats of matte. Going overtop existing glossy paint is an order of magnititude faster and easier, but I wonder if the harder approach would last longer.
First though, a correction about matte paint shrinking; it turns out that both the matte and normal paint shrink. If you compare the far left, non-matte tan color to the airbrushing_42 picture from yesterday, you'll see it has now shrunk to be the same diameter of the matte colors to its right. I did some digging and came across
https://www.smooth-on.com/tutorials/shr ... e-solvent/ which confirms it's just the act of putting thinner into any silicone that causes it to shrink. So I expect the lower two, larger paint remains from yesterday will be this smaller size tomorrow.
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Here's how the doll looked in the morning, pretty strange with the different coloring.
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The side with the coverup color and layers of too-light of pink came off easily with the underlying petrolum jelly. It takes awhile to get all the tiny bits off but I didn't spend a ton of time since more petrolum jelly was about to be applied.
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I prepped a lot of cling wrap and paper towels to aid in cleaning for the many layers of paint planned for today.
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This color was alot closer to what I was hoping to achieve compared to the sad mixing efforts of yesterday. It's a color in betwen the too-red on the left and too-pink on the right. I later added the thinner to create a paint composed of 1g part A, 1g part B, 2g matte thinner, and 1g normal. But I quickly encountered a clog and had to introduce about 1-2g more normal thinner. For this cheap airbrush at least, the paint needs to drip off a mixing stick in drops, if the paint forms a thin stream or is in any way stream-like, it's too thick and will splatter and quickly get clogged inside the needle cap.
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And here's the setup with cleaning tools and cling wrap to help preserve the paint as the day progresses. Having a longer pipette would be handy since the tiny one that came with the airbrush is too short to reach into the bottom of the thinner bottle. Every time thinner is needed I have to carefully tip it for the pipette to reach and I don't have a shorter bottle with cap and don't want to let it sit out in an open mixing cup since it evaporates so quickly. I end up using thinner all the time: to ensure the airbrush is working before adding paint, to thin the paint mixture as it thickens through the day, and to clean the airbrush after finishing a layer.
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And here's the quick work of making the too-red and glossy nipple into a matte finish, just a single, EXTREMELY LIGHT coat of the matte paint. I was planning to do many more coats but after the matte was applied, it really hid the doll's original pink color. This result is from 2 layers of matte paint that was too thick to achieve the matte finish, then one more EXTREMELY LIGHT layer of matte.
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If it's any consolation I'll hopefully figure out how to achieve my "goal" picture and all this detail will save you some effort. I never learned how to paint so jumping into learning to airbrush using silicone-based products is probably one of the worst ways to get started.
