Looking at the threads here, a lot of people fully assemble figures with all of their equipment before painting. How do you paint the stuff you can't get to when you do that? I understand getting most of the body done for reasons of filling gaps and whatnot, but no idea how you paint around equipment.

Hey Jesse,

For what it's worth,I would normally assemble the figure without head gear and equipment.
First I paint the face , hands and chin straps.When they dry I do the uniform and boots.
Then I do the head gear and equipment while on the sprue.
After all these are attached,I just touchup the marks were they have been cut from the sprue.
Any weathering and dry brushing I leave to the end.
I find it a pretty safe method.Hope this helps you out.
Tom

I do pretty much the same as Tom. I think it was posted in an earlier discussion. Paint the figure to get the details covered, then paint the gear on the sprue, glue in place, touch up. I use CA glue to add the gear over the paint job. I add a few unwanted steps, such as touching up my touch ups, finding the gear after I drop the figure on the floor and it all pops off, and I spend a lot of time trying to fix my paint job on the head. IT is much easier, at least for me, to do the main painting with everything separate from the figure.

Thanks guys! That was what I was in the process of doing, but I was looking at one of the diorama threads, and the builder had all of his guys fully assembled, but no paint. I was going insane trying to figure out how they'd paint them!

Using the CA glue on the already painted parts is another little light-bulb moment. I was trying to scrape paint off some surfaces to be glued. Duh... just grab the CA stuff. I need to get some stuff that bonds a little faster. The gel I have takes longer than I'd like.

Interesting, I found the 'paint the assembled figure, the equipment on-sprue, then assemble w/crazy glue' method by trial and error... glad to not have to scrape paint off anymore, as someone said just now...

I do the same with armour and vehicles, etc. Give each piece of kit the weathering to tell it's story, and then I CA glue it (cyanoacrylate, fancy talk for crazy glue,) onto the fig/vehicle right where I want it. Then I do a bit more weathering with the 'shovel etc' in place. (Hey, am I the only one here who softly blows over the curing cement?) Maybe it helps quicken the cure...