Hello All:
Well, I finally broke down and bought my own air brush. Just this evening I
made my first attempt at painting something with it. The subject was a 25mm
Demos grav tank that I've been sitting on since Gen Con. After giving the
model a black undercoat, I decided that I would paint the tank U.S. green with
olive drab tiger stripes. Following the directions in the cheap airbrushing
guide I picked up, I started with the lighter color (olive drab) and gave the
main hull a coat of olive drab. Tomorrow, I'll mask off the stripes, and then
spray of the green. Needless to say, it was a lot faster than using a
traditional brush and (despite the clean up) was a lot more fun.
If all goes well, it should be quite a striking model. If not... my tank will
be getting a Formula 409 bath. In the meantime, does anyone have any over all
tips or suggestions about air brushing figs?
> If all goes well, it should be quite a striking model. If
Unless the air brush is an expensive one with a very fine tip you are going to
have to use a mask. friskit doesn't stick well
to 1/300 miniatures and using card templates as stencils is
difficult because of the bleeding and overspray, same problems with friskit
lifting.
The only masking that works well is masking fluid, but then you might as well
paint the stripes by hand as you may well get a better finish and don't have
to peel off fiddly mask.
I gave up trying to do fine tiger stripe cammo by air brush as the results by
hand are superior. Air brush is ok for freehand splotch and band patterns. You
need a good air supply (compressor with regulator) and a dual action air
brush. I found the badger air brush ready paints though expensive give the
best results as you don't have to play with the viscosity which also has a bif
effect on fine line control. That and lots of practice on graph paper to get
the control.
If you work out a working masking technique for tiger stipe let us know here.
Couple of tips.
If you are swapping between colors then use air brush liquid reamer this is a
spray of trichlorethylene (use ventillation) and flush into tray of clean
kitty litter (it soaks up stuff very well).
This allows me to switch colors rapidly without having to strip down the whole
thing. at the end clean with reamer, it makes sure there are no nasty little
bits of paint left which will spell doom to the air brush.
enamels are coarse pigmented so need to be very well stirred and filtered,
acrylics are by far the easier.
On Sun, 02 Apr 2000 23:33:47 -0500, "Mark A. Siefert"
<siefert@milwpc.com> wrote:
> If all goes well, it should be quite a striking model. If
Talk about synchronicity. I painted up some 25mm Kryomek grav tanks and GZG
VTOLS using my airbrush for the cammo schemes.
It's not THAT expensive a brush, so I can't do very, very fine work. But, for
the work I'm after, it's fine.
I did find that it's good for doing base coat painting. I'm painting some FSE
ships. I took some Tamiya dark blue, thinned it with Tamiya thinner, and
painted the ships with my airbrush. It was very quick. Now I just paint the
panels in a lighter colour. I could use a spray paint, but then if I have to
do touch ups it's hard to find regular paint to match. Assuming I could find
the right colour. I plan to do my NAC ships with Tamiya light grey first, and
then paint their panels in white.
Other than that, if it's a cheap airbrush you won't be able to do any fine
work. But you could do a killer Kra'vak cammo on some Kra'vak FT ships.
Good luck with it, Mark.