Learning to Airbrush - First Steps

Last week I got an airbrush for my birthday - more particularly a Harder & Steenbeck Evolution so this week I've been teaching myself how to use it.

I'd already picked up a compressor so as soon as I got my hands on the Evolution I had an area set up out the back of the house ready to start learning.

My two advisers weren't massively impressed at having to share their space with a compressor to begin with but eventually the regular nonchalance returned.

After unassembling the brush and cleaning it, as per Paul Bullock's videos on Youtube I decided to start at the start of a model, with the primer. The three bases below show my first tests at getting the mix of paint and thinner right - right hand side first was far too much thinner, which was me being terrified of the brush clogging. I added a little more paint for the next two and they turned out with a better coverage.

I kept the blend the same for my first model but added some brown ink as well as the model to go under the brush was the Unithorn from Warploque, which just so happens to be the same shade of resin as the standard vallejo primer.

Also to get some primer was the Siren, also from Warploque.

The next experiment was with ink. I had the idea to try and paint the Unithorn in a similar style to how I painted Keysha's base - a light base followed by layers of brown and black ink. That didn't quite go to plan.

I have it a coat of Deck Tan and fired up the airbrush with some chestnut ink in it - it turns out that ink in the airbrush does the opposite of ink applied by a regular brush. A regular brush will pool ink in recesses and depths, while the vaporised ink from an airbrush just sticks to the raised surfaces.

Moving away from the airbrush, I wanted to see what would happen if I followed through with my ink plan with regular brushes instead. I've now layered up some brown, chestnut, brown/black mix and green/brown/black mixed inks, all from the Inktensity Scale Color set and here's how he currently stands.

He still needs his glowy eyes doing but at the moment he already has a John Blanche feel to him in my eyes.

Also needed for him is a base, which I built up using some S75 sandy paste, some gravel and a couple of rocks. I then gave it a coat of ScaleColor Arbuckle "brown", which I'm renaming Beetroot.

Back to the airbrush. I after the semi success of actually priming the Unithorn, I decided to attack some terrain for BMG. I got excited about it actually working and forgot to take a picture, but two shipping crates and a pallet got primed.

I then mixed up a couple of Scale Color blues for the pallet (blue pallets are a thing - they're basically all rented out from one company to save you buying and having to remove pallets.) Once that was done, I took some basing sponge and dabbed some browns on to add some mud.

So, my first airbrush/non paintbrush piece is done, and it's a highly interesting piece of scatter terrain for BMG.

To finish, these are two sights that I'm getting used to. Firstly, the glove being covered in paint spatter. The blue bits are good, they're just testing out different pressures. The grey bits, which are primer, are me trying to work out what has gone wrong with the brush in that it's not firing at full power down to some mistake or other.

The second sight, and one I think I'll be seeing very often, is that of a disassembled airbrush, cleaning everything because I have no idea where the problem is!