I have been playing around with the airbrush again. It was a little less daunting this time and yielded some good results. I ordered a colour on eBay called Vallejo dark sea grey as the codex carcharodon colours where a little bright for my tastes. I created a 1:1 dark sea grey to black as my shading colour and applied the first layer. next was an original dark sea grey layer. when both of these layers dried i realised that although it looked allot better than being hand painted that the colour variation between the two layers may of worked a little better using a light grey or white undercoat as the black may of made the already dark grey darker, after this i applied a lighter variation of dark sea grey by adding 1 part white to it. Although this did make the darker tones stand out i may of been a little heavy handed brightening up too much of the model, again something i will keep in mind for the airbrush's next outing. After the b base layers were painted I sealed them with a gloss finish so that if I made any mistakes from here on out I basically have a save point to come back to. From the picture you can see the gloss looks white but this is just due to camera flash and is actually invisible to look at. I finished this session by painting the shoulder pads abandon black just to get a better feel for the final colour scheme (washes and details next) I was impressed with my first attempt at 3 layer base coats and learned a few things I would like to try out next time.
Grey base coat instead of the black to see if there is a colour variation.
Lighter handed on the hi light coat as I think it was a little too much.
Thinner layer of gloss.
While this is only 3 things I can think of to try next time I'm sure I will come across a few other snags or happy surprises but ether way I'm impressed with my first attempt and things can only get better right ?......RIGHT ? OK well that's if for this post Dan
Well that was an experience... As I mentioned in my previous post I recently purchased an airbrush which came allot quicker than I had expected :)
And these are my first 3 base coated models. All 3 started with a black base coat the 2 on the right have had 3 different shades of grey dark, original and a light highlight,
This is pretty hard to tell from the quality of the picture but also I haven't had the pleasure of mixing the tones before so It was hard to judge the difference with each one, from this experience I learned that my undercoat needs to be a few shades darker as its not as easy to differentiate the regular and darker tone as I would like but I'll take a note of this next time I get the airbrush out :) Also learned from hand on experience the correct paint to thinner ration, It's easy to say 1:1 ratio when its on a video or down in writing but actually doing something that sounds so simple even that needs a little practice. Overall verdict is very positive, the initial black coat went on and looked brilliant. The grey coats though not perfect are smoother than painting them and with a little practice the future looks positive :) Below is just a short video of my first experience with the airbrush, there is no talking init but thought I would record it anyways but will be narrating videos in the future.
As I have recently mentioned soon I will be starting to use an airbrush so I wanted to make sure I read up about ways to use and clean my airbrush and came across what seems like a common mistake among new people to the hobby like myself. I'm from the UK so when I was watching tutorials there seems to be allot of mention of reducer, which in some videos and tutorials is a method to both thin paint and clean your airbrush between colours.At first I thought this was more of a colloquial term for what here in the UK we call paint thinner, so just to make sure I checked around to see if that was the case and i'm glad that I did. A quick eHow search lead me to this."The main difference between thinners and reducers is in the paint type that is being applied.Thinners are for lacquer-based paints. Reducers are used for urethane-based paints. " These products are important if you was going to be spray painting cars and I think the majority of people buy this kind of thing because the video tell's them too.in my opinion, be it right or wrong these products have no place in my hobby kit when it comes to actually thinning my acrylic paints. The most common paint to be using for painting miniatures is Acrylic "Acrylic paint is fast drying paint containing pigment suspension in acrylic polymeremulsion" As acrylic paint is a water based paint then for the purpose of thinning paint enough to use in an airbrush is actually in my opinion the best and cheapest solution.The disadvantage of using water to thin your paints is actually a positive for airbrush painting. "Adding water to your paints will both thin down your paint and reduces the intensity of pigment" From this "disadvantage" of this thinning method I find the positive would obviously be that the thinner your paint is, while yes it would take a couple more coats of any given paint you will have allot more control over the paint out of the airbrush.Obviously there would be an acceptable limit to how thin you would paint but if that's the only disadvantage I see no reason to buy any other medium for thinning my paint. So why do they even have thinners/ medium ?Simple answer to this is that they are used for tube paints, Most likely if you are buying your first hobby paint set you will be buying a variety of colours at a cheaper prices that come in squeeze bottles aka fluid acrylics, The amount you are going to be thinning these paints will not really be enough to necessitate the use of paint mediums unless you are wanting to change your current paint into a matt, satin or gloss based paint but for that you would be buying it as a medium not as a thinner. What would you use to clean the airbrush ?Personally I will be using a substance called turpentine substitute or as people in the UK may also know it, white spirit/ mineral spirits, This can be picked up from your supermarketat a fraction of the price fora much bigger bottle than any named alternative from the top brand paint brand companies. I have also been reading into it and there are people that say it will also work to thin my paint so I may consider adding a drop or 2 to water while thinning it. This is a mild irritant so I would suggest using gloves if you have sensative skin.
The thing I think people forget is that for model painting we will be using acrylic paints and dont need a heavy industrial cleaner when warm water can remove a water based paint from any surface, the white spirit just makes it a little easier.
This is just a heads up to a couple of future post’s I will be making soon. I decided to buy myself an airbrush and compressor.for 3 part base coating. By that I mean creating an initial darker layer for the shadowed areas, the main colour for my themed army and finally a hilghted area but more on that when it arrives and when I have had a little practice with it. I will not be using the airbrush for all my posts as I feel it will steer away a lot of people with out one but videos, tips tutorials and updates on what I’m learning will definitely make an appearance soon here. I opted for the AS186 AS 186 with Compressor with Tank with 2 x Double Action Airbrushes. I chose this mainly for the affordable air compressor and the Airbrushes are a nice little bonus, as I don’t plan on doing a lot of detail work with the airbrushes I found it would be pointless to fork out 1/200 on an all singing all dancing airbrush but in the future who knows Anyway that was my quick update on things to come
