Airbrushing Part 1

It has been a very busy few weeks and as a result I've made a lot less progress on modelling than I would have hoped. Here we are on a Friday evening and after an exhausting week I want to catch up on the blog by looking at something which can be taken for granted but which is often a source of mystery to the uninitiated: airbrushing.

It's all too easy to assume that using an airbrush is obvious - you buy it, plug it in, and off you go. Actually to the new user the entire thing is baffling and basics such as getting the paint from pots to the cup, thinning paint, setting the pressure, or cleaning up after you've finished are potential areas of confusion. Certainly my own usage has been a process of trial and error over a period of time and although I'm now happy with the tools and methods it is also clear that my approach is not necessarily shared by everyone. Crucially, that's fine, because it's all about taking risks and learning from mistakes. So, I want to write a series of posts which go over the basics of how I used the airbrush and the tools I use.

Like many people returning to the hobby I had never used an airbrush or even seen one when I built models as a child. Such equipment was beyond the financial means open to my parents and the internet was a long way in the future so even finding such equipment would have been a challenge. When I took up the hobby again I started reading around and was astonished at the finishes being achieved by other modellers such as Brett Green and Marcus Nicholls. I'll never get to that level and that's fine, but having started by using the classic Humbrol enamels applied by hand, and having been deeply unsatisfied with the results, I wanted to raise my game and try something new.

During my next visit to the now-defunct Modelzone I bought a very cheap Revell single-action starter airbrush, with a suction feed. In addition I bought some Tamiya paints, a bottle of Revell airbrush cleaner, a canister of Revell airbrush propellant and some thinner. When I got home and started using the airbrush I was confronted with some problems:

1. How do you get the paint from the paint pots to the airbrush? In the case of this particular airbrush it came with a bottle from which the paint was sucked but I was wasting a lot of paint just getting it into the airbrush bottle.
2. How much should the paint be thinned for a particular effect?
3. With power provided by gas canisters I had no control over pressure and the canisters kept freezing up, mostly at the most inopportune moments.
4. How do you go about cleaning the airbrush without spraying paint everywhere? How much do you need to strip the airbrush down? Just how particular do you need to be in cleaning the airbrush? Does it need to be thoroughly cleaned every time you change paint colour?
5. Can you re-use the paint which is left over? Again I was wasting a lot of paint because of my very inexact methods of getting the paint to the airbrush.
6. How do you hold small pieces when airbrushing? How do you make sure that you can paint the various surfaces of the model in a straightforward way? How do you avoid spraying the table rather than the model?
7. Do you airbrush on the sprue, or maybe only airbrush the completed kit, or perhaps airbrush separate parts and then fit the kit together? A combination of all of the above?

In addition, of course, I quickly noticed that atomised paint and one's lungs are not necessarily compatible, as I've discussed elsewhere. I also quickly became aware of lots of equipment which was far superior to anything I was using, such as compressors or dual action airbrushes with gravity feed and very fine capabilities. If I wanted to upgrade, what would be right for me? How could I find out without the risk of spending a fortune which might be wasted?

Having said this, I was astonished by the finish achieved by this very cheap and basic piece of equipment. The surface was finer and more consistent than anything possible with a paintbrush, even with my early clumsy attempts, because of course airbrushes are able to apply paint in thicknesses which can be measured in microns, so preserving surface detail. It was a question of pushing the possibilities of such equipment and upgrading as I went along.

So, next time in this series I'll get to the next stage of the process - answering the above questions.

Zigerastica