More Painting...

I developed a refinement to my painting technique that seems to be doing an amazing job. It allows me to put the paint on really thin and almost perfectly smooth. I've created virtually zero orange peel since I started using this method. What I am doing is using a good deal more mineral spirits than I was using previously. I mix the spirits with the paint in the paint tray using a paint stirrer. To mix the paint and spirits I'm using a side to side motion with the stick kept at an angle to kind of force the paint on the bottom to rise to the top where the spirits are. I never move it fast enough to generate bubbles. After that I let the roller soak until it is completely saturated. I then roll it out on the tray until there is no dripping. With my roller full of paint I target an entire panel at once and work very quickly applying pressure to the roller to push the paint side to side all over the entire panel. Once I have coverage I typically have a relatively empty paint roller and I use it to very very gently pop the bubbles in the paint working from bottom to top with vertical movements. The bubbles should pop almost instantly if you've used enough mineral spirits but the trick is to continue working the paint for a few minutes. Just use gentle motions and try to be very soft and continuous. Your goal at this point is to softly work out the orange peel while the paint is settling up. Ideally you would look at the panel from an angle where you can really see the gloss on the surface. You can literally see the orange peel setting up. That is when you need to carefully take your roller in there and knock it down. Keep doing this until the paint starts to get sticky. At that point it will basically be set up and you will have dramatically reduced the orange peel that you have to sand off later. The key is to do an entire panel at once to avoid seems, work very quickly initially to get the paint on there, and then very delicately to smooth the orange peel.