I read on one of the forums a while ago about a Wavy Gravy technique of painting rockets. I tried it back then on a couple of rockets.

Then, not long ago, my niece came over and saw them. We struck up a conversation about the technique of pouring oil-based paints on water and then submerging something through the paint into the water. She had been doing that in grade school. She really wanted to do that to a rocket too.

Since I had a few Alpha III's left over from this year's classroom build, I got a small group of my nieces and nephews, and one of the adult pairs, to build and paint rockets.

It was a blast!

In case you haven't heard, Swirl Painting, aka Wavy Gravy, aka Sumanigashi, is a cool process. As mentioned, pour small amounts of various oil-based paints on water, and lightly swirl the colors around. Then, dunk your rocket through them into the water! Before pulling the rocket back out, use a paper towel to push the remaining paint to the side, so as to not coat the rocket on the way in and again on the way out.

Here's one.

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As you could surmise, water gets into the rocket. This is a problem, because now the inside and the outside are wet. One with oil-based paint, and the other with water and a small amount of water-based paint.

I had prepared the nose cones by wrapping blue tape around them and putting them back in the body tubes. This made a tight seal, and kept the nose cones from seeping. They could be slowly slid out once the paint dried.

I didn't do that with the engines. That was a mistake. Or a learning opportunity. Whatever.

I had put an old 18mm engine on a 5/8 dowel, put that in the engine mount, and used that as a handle for dunking the rockets. It sounded smart. And it was, except that the engines didn't seal well, and paint went into the mount. As they dried, the engine and the mount became inseparable friends. Oh well. An opportunity to replace the engine mounts after the rockets were already built. We are all good at doing rocket surgery, aren't we?

Here's another.

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After a day or two, the paint dried enough that I could remove the nose cones. Now, the body tubes could finish drying. They were a bit damp and spongy until then. If the engines could have come out earlier, I could have had the body tubes drying earlier.

One more thing that we found is that metallic paints might not work. They have metal. So they are dense. Some colors are denser than others.

Silver paint is probably not with real silver. I think it is aluminum, because it floated.

Gold paint didn't float. According to my experimental results, it might actually have gold in it. Or another heavy faux gold.

But, it was also found that floating silver makes a really cool complement to floating blue paint.

Like this rocket.

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Another thing you'll notice in the photos is that the paint isn't really smooth. It has runs and droops in it.

That's because the paint we used wasn't really thin. It was Testor's model paint, poured right out of the bottle. This allowed a bit of clumping and thick-film interference to form. Kind of like using a lava lamp.

On other rockets you'll see some of the base coat - black and orange because these were Alpha III's - show through. Some of the kids had anxiety before dunking because they didn't want it to happen. But, afterwards, it was just like black or orange was included, and it looked perfectly fine.

Here's another.

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As I mentioned, I had tied it before. I did it on a Maxi Brute V2 with earth tones and olive drab. It was a really cool camouflage pattern.

But, I can't find that one right now, so use your imagination.

Instead, I'll show one of the others that I did back then. I had noticed that the Testor's paints were thick, so I did an experiment with spray paints. That formed a really thin coat, but set up pretty quickly.

It ended up with a gossamery, tissue-papery, flimsy look to it.

And this is the last of this exposition. We'll go launch them, and maybe even lose them, next weekend. Hopefully not lose them. I'm planning on using A engines, since they've hardly ever launched before and an A whoosh is still a whoosh!

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That's very pretty! "The Vixen" and I used to do a similar process with Easter eggs. We'ed float a multi-colored film over water with special paints and then submerge the egg through the film--causing the film to enrobe the egg.

People would beg us to tell them how we did it, and we'ed try to explain it but as soon as their eyes started to glaze over we knew they'ed lost interest.

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