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I was just reading an article about painting soft plastic figures, such as those produced by Airfix. My local model store has some boxes of these figures and I was going to pick some up. I was reading that it is a good idea to coat soft plastic figures with diluted PVA glue before painting.

My question is do you then put a layer of primer over the PVA coat? Anyone have any experience with this? Thanks.

I think you might get away with just using foundation paint to be honest. There are videos on youtube about this and there seems to be various ideas about how to do it, the truth is that no perfect solution exists.
Believe it or not,enamel is pretty resilient on these figures and that might be the way to go.
You may find that you'll need to use pva as a varnish at the end as a kind of flexible coating to stop the paint cracking.

Acrylic Gesso works well.

Acrylic Gesso a mixture of a PVA type of substrate with a chalk like substance. It adheres well to the soft plastic, and gives a good key for painting.

You can buy it from graphics art shops. It can be slightly diluted with water, and if you like it can be coloured with acrylic paint, to give you a quick start on the final paint job.

You need to make sure the figures are completely clean and grease free before priming. Do this by scrubbing lightly in warm water and detergent, then rinsing and drying.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Acrylic Gesso works well.

Acrylic Gesso a mixture of a PVA type of substrate with a chalk like substance. It adheres well to the soft plastic, and gives a good key for painting.

You can buy it from graphics art shops. It can be slightly diluted with water, and if you like it can be coloured with acrylic paint, to give you a quick start on the final paint job.

You need to make sure the figures are completely clean and grease free before priming. Do this by scrubbing lightly in warm water and detergent, then rinsing and drying.

I actually used gesso when I first started painting minis, based on advice I read on this website!