Most of the paint was Kryolan Aqua, the exception being the gold. I find the Kryolan gold to be a bit insipid if you want "real gold" - (although it's better than their silver).
The base blue was applied with a sponge, and went on remarkably quickly. Initially it was "painted" with the sponge, and then a quick dabbing pass to remove the small amount of streaking that the paint strokes generated.
The gold was a new discovery (for me). "peterplatypus" in Sydney kindly provided
me with some "gold dust" - very fine metal powder - which he uses with
an oil base.
I needed something that would stand up to the battering involved in a long paint
session, so I tried mixing it with various substrates: water, latex, and
eventually plain old stationer's clear glue. That produced the most beautiful,
dazzling, hard wearing and workable gold. It's easy to produce fine work,
stays workable, uses a minute amount of powder, and is just great.
The most time consuming component was the dangly decorations on the suit.
We referred to these as "tea bags" because for some months I had no
detailed photo of what they actually looked like, and they just looked like
tea bags in the long-distance shots.
For these I stamped the outlines of the circles - the seemingly endless number of circles -
and then filled them with the brush.
The sword was another amateur welding job, although it featured better welds than did joan of Arc's sword, so my welding must be improving.
Roger Edgecombe
June, 1998