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So you want to paint your rifle camouflage. I painted mine 2 years ago and this is how I did it. The information in this post could also apply to equipment you may want to paint. Chances are high you’ll have paint left over anyway.

The idea to paint my rifle came from a local gun dealer. The rifle in question is a bolt-action Browning A-Bolt Stainless Stalker in .308 caliber. It’s all stainless steal with a black synthetic stock. I hump the woods with this thing, so I wanted stainless and synthetic. I’ve had bad luck hunting shitty weather with a blued rifle, and I’m always cautious about banging up the wood stock.

On the rifle I mounted a Leupold Vari-X III 2.5-8 x 36mm scope. The scope matched the stainless barrel. I took it to a local store for scope rings. The dude looked at it and said, “Dude, why don’t you paint that thing?” I admit, it looked space-age like. Hey, here it is before I painted it:

And look - deer meat!

To read more about those sexy boots click here.

The guy then goes into the back and brings out a rifle that he painted. It was camo - sort of. It was a rough job, let’s just put it that way. But it was functional in the attract less attention department. This set about my desire to eliminate the beacon of light reflecting off the shiny gray whenever the sun shone down. At first I was reluctant to painting it, so I thought I’d go temporary with some sort of camo tape, but then I figured it’d just collect moisture under the tape and the tape would become slippery in the hands when wet. It was then my thought that I’d send the rifle to a professional and have the rifle painted entirely in Real Tree. I eventually found a place, but the prices were totally outrageous, plus the shipping, and every part you added on bumped up the price big time. Screw that.

So I set about searching the web endlessly for good information on painting it. There was no perfect page, so I blended the information from many and used the following approach. Leaf, twig, and grass stencils are readily available if you don’t want digital camo, but it was my view that digital would look the best. Let’s roll!

To replicate my approach you need the pictured paints:

From left to right is 220 grit fine sand paper, Dupli-Color “Adhesion Promoter”, Krylon 1318 All Purpose Primer Gray, Krylon 8141 Khaki Ultra-Flat, Krylon 8142 Brown Ultra-Flat, Krylon 8143 Olive Drab Ultra-Flat, Krylon 8140 Black Ultra-Flat, and Krylon 8149 Light Gray “Special Purpose” Camouflage. It was a little tricky assembling them all. If I remember correctly the 4 cans of Ultra-Flat came as a package purchased somewhere online. The Adhesion Promoter and Primer I purchased at a local auto parts store. The Krylon special purpose light gray I ordered as an individual can - somewhere online.

In addition to this you’ll need masking tape and stencil material. The stencil material I bought at Wal-Fart. Just go to the back of the store to the craft section where all of the old ladies hang out. Look around and you should find 8.5×11 (or so) flexible plastic sheets of this stuff. I cut digital patterns into the plastic with a razor blade (an Exacto knife would be better).

I took the gun apart, the scope, rings, bolt, trigger guard, stock, etc. I stripped some electrical wire to hang the stock and barrel with. It provided some rigidity, but it was also flexible (plus I had some on hand). I lightly scratched the surface of the stock and the scope with the sand paper. I carefully taped everything I didn’t want painted: internal parts exposed, sling studs, the scope lens (I provided ample safety here and went near the edge of the scope which is later covered by scope covers), wicked cool Browning logo, etc.

Then I applied the adhesion promoter to the stock (helps the paint bond to the plastic). Then came the Krylon primer over everything, a few coats. I decided to use the Khaki as my base and I covered everything in it, the barrel, the stock, the parts.

Mind you I was in no rush to do this, so I did it over the course of a week, giving each layer plenty of time to dry. I just started in with the stencils, alternating colors, bit by bit:

You’ll notice that I used NO black. The military eliminated black in the new camo for a reason - it stands out. I favored light colors. The darkest I went was brown. Note: When I did apply paint to the scope I went exceptionally light where the magnification numbers are. I can still read them fully. Be careful with the scope.

I painted until I was happy with the stencil pattern, but something was still missing. The “digital” lines were too sharp. It didn’t blend as well as I liked, so this is what I did. From about 3 feet back I sprayed a real fine olive drab mist over everything. I let it fall in place very lightly and it made the difference.

Be careful where you set your finished rifle down. I added a camouflage sling. It’s been two years since the paint job. I have a few misc. dings and twig scratches on the paint job, but these actually end up improving the camouflage (I think). After finishing the job I told the Mrs. I wanted to paint our son’s room this way, only with bigger stencils . . . it didn’t fly.

If you see someone in the November woods of Maine with this thing say, “Hey, Ranger Man!” and tell me where the deer are.

Happy painting!

- Ranger Man

BTW: this post was partially inspired by a post Kaiser published. Coming from a guy that totally picked up one of my raging sexy EMP-proof, grid down field manuals, how could I not respond?

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