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04/30/2026: BMW E30 Very pleased with a lot of what I did here. I've gotten a lot of compliments on the color and I'm super stoked with what I mixed up. What I tried new: - Mixing my own paint color. - Painted the window trims on the outside. - Adding metal exhaust pipes. What went well: - Color is absolutley killer. A shell pink that I would absolutely drive a 1:1 car of. Sort of Hello Kitty + vintage Fender strat. - Exhaust looks good, it's understated but adds a nice scale touch. - Body panel lining adds so much scale detail. Makes this $35 body look like a $40 body, easy. - The window stickers all look great. The plain colored ones aren't actually what I'd initially envisioned, but they add a nice pop of color. - Window trims look pretty good. I'll prob do that again. What could've gone better: - The front bumper black stripe is wonky. Just needed to tape cleaner. - I think that's it? This turned out pretty dang well.

02/18/2026: Subaru Impreza This is my favorite paint job yet. The color choice and style match really well and it all feels very cohesive and purposeful. Try something new: - I tried to do drop shadows for the side paint and it does look good despite being a little sloppy. There's some bleed and not all of the offsets are uniform, but you've gotta be examining it up close to tell. What went well: - Color choices. The pink to purple fade is so dank. The silver to gold fade is cool too, but not gradual enough to be noticeable that it's a fade. - Wing and fitment. Just looks cool. What could have gone better: - Drop shadow bleed. - I added the back window sticker off center because I was too focused on getting it aligned up and down. - I forgot body line tape!

I'm very happy with how this turned out overall. I love the street style build and will definitely do more of these. I stretched myself on this design by making the livery bit myself using a texture pack of svg's I got off Etsy. They were originally for a square design, so I had to figure out how to edit paths and use Illustrator and it was just enough of a brain exercise. Will do again. Masking the hood, roof, and trim all in one color was so nice. Really good result to hide some body lines. What didn't go so well? Not much for this build. Though, I don't love how dark the red turned out. That just comes down to me not knowing exactly how some of these Createx colors look on lexan yet though. What's something I'll do again in a future build? Using the Createx pearlized gold satin looks SO good for the top layer of the stenciling. Will do again. Will also wrap the whole pillars/roof/hood in one black in the future. Easy and looks great. What's something I'll do differently in future builds? I should be testing these colors on lexan together before spraying in the body. The red is much darker than I'd anticipated which worked OK because I used gold, but would have been blegh with other colors.

12/09/2025: Gingerbread Ninja This is the second mini I've painted, this one over the course of about 3 nights. I love the crisp clean lines I managed to achieve in some points, like the sleeve and pants cuffs. I like the color palette I ended up with, the purple, gold, blue, and black look very poppy together. I don't like the bubbly weirdness in between his face and his hood, and overall there are some bubbles and thick spots in quite a few places. I think I need to load my brush more lightly and do more light coats instead of slapping too much paint on. Learned: 1. Paint in several lighter coats instead of one thick one. 2. Use stock colors over custom mixed ones if possible, because you'll be able to fix spots without having to mix the custom color again. 3. The metallic flake colors (gunmetal and gold) seem more watery than the regular ones. Overall I gotta shake the paints up better to avoid the watery runniness.