Wade,
The foam that you ar e speaking of is used as a form to lay up the 'glass. Cover the form and the riser with a mold release, (plastic wrap, tape or the like)glass over it, I used 8 layers of the same Raka glass. Once green cured, remove from the mold, clean up the edges, then epoxy onto the riser.
As for paint, I didn't. I used epoxy tint from System Three, to color the layup, In the case of Em's boat, purple. Looks pretty cool!
Jim Kozel used a brown tint on the coaming of his recent project, others have used graphite powder to make a black coaming.
Ross, Vaclav, and J Schroeder, have the process well documented on their sites.
Hope this helps.
Steve