Friday 29 July 2011

First Foray into Airbrushing


I finally found some time to sit down and run some paint through my airbrush a few hours ago. This is the first time I've ever used one, so I have to admit I've been a little nervous as I wasn't sure what to expect.

I thought I'd start with something relatively simple for my first attempt - I've spray coated the interior detail of the Land Raider Terminus I've been working on, and decided to paint it Desert Yellow as a base coat.

First off, thinning - to begin with, I decanted the brand new pot of Desert Yellow into a dropper bottle, and cracked open my dropper bottle of Windex (which a number of painters I've spoken to swear by as a thinner - no, it doesn't tint your paint blue!). Since I usually brush-paint with a 1:1 mix of paint to water\flow-aid, I thought I'd start with this ratio as I've read that you want your airbrush paint to have the consistency of milk (which would be thinner than my normal mixes). Well, let me just say that this simply didn't work for me. After filling up the paint cup on the brush with a 1:1 mix and spraying the first piece (the larger roof panel), I found it way too thin to work with - coverage was horrible, exposing black undercoat at every edge, and running the air over the painted piece with no paint spraying out created pretty little explosions of paint as it sprayed to the edge of the piece and beyond.

Right, back to the drawing board. Much mixing and experimenting later, I found a 2:1 paint to thinner mix to be about right. All in all, it took about 30 minutes to airbrush the 8 pieces that comprises the interior. They've been sitting for about 2 hours now and are mostly touch-dry.

That's all for my update for now - nothing terribly exciting, but my first real air-brush experience. I'm looking forward to testing it out in much more depth over this weekend.

Back to undercoating the rest of the tank :)

3 comments:

  1. You've got more courage than me, skipping straight to painting a model with your airbrush. I went through a stack of paper before I was comfortable enough to actually use the brush on a model.

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  2. Also, I think this guy's airbrushing videos are pretty useful if you haven't seen them: http://www.youtube.com/my_subscriptions?feature=mhee&s=hsakqp0yTWZPfxrUUSVAiGmjVlomxa96kKRx97OlozY

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  3. Well, I figured I was just painting an interior, so even if I couldn't fix it with another coat of black primer and a reattempt, I could just glue the doors shut and never speak of it again ;)

    Thanks very much for the link, will check those out right now (unless my boss walks in :)

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