Ulthuan

So I'm married to a wonderful woman who purchased an Iwata Eclipse HP or CS or something. Which ever one has the gravity feed haha.

I then bought the entire Vallejo Game Color Air line from the Warstore and when I sat down to paint a friend's cauldron of blood this morning I found that when spraying the metallics i'm getting individual pigments popping up over the model kind of like I sprayed it with a cheap metallic spray paint. Any suggestions?

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Well, for starters, never let go of that wonderful woman...

Things that come to mind, which you could try:
- shake the paint more. If the paint is not mixed well enough, then you're going to notice it and you'll notice it more with an airbrush then with a normal brush. So shake and then shake some more.
- Play around with the air pressure. It could be that your pressure it too high, which results in the paint getting blown all over the place. Or it's too low and the metallic pigments are getting stuck along the way.
- Play around with the distance between miniature and airbrush. Bit similar to air pressure. Too far away and the paint dries before it reaches the mini, resulting in a bit a blotchy paintjob. Too close and the paint heaps up in a place and you get these spiderweb kind of patches (a bit hard to explain, but if it happens, you'll know)
- practice, practice and practice.

Some more airbrush questions (for those who actually know what they're talking about, unlike me)
- What nozzle size do people use for painting mini's?
- Anyone have some tips for painting white? Whenever I try to airbrush white, all it does is just block up my airbrush...

@Mal, sorry about adding more questions here. I'll take em out if you want.

Rod

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Eirik wrote:

Please try to remember that, no matter how 'official' the source seems, rumours are basically just a dictionary combined with a random number generator

For Nagarythe: Come to the dark side.
PS: Bring cookies!

Check out my plog
Painting progress, done/in progress/in box: 167/33/91

I am buying my aero next week so now I cannot help ypu, but I will find that thread very usefull for sure:))

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Galharen's painting blog

The winged hussar host - army blog

Lets just make this a general thread for answer questions about airbrushing?


To answer yours: I'm using a 0.3mm tip which is what Lester Burly (awesomepaintjob on youtube) recommends for starting as it base coats really well and gives you the option to do medium level detail work.

What psi are you shooting at? I know even with VGA paints I sometimes add just an extra drop of thinner to make it shoot better.

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Is your spray distance right? Something similar has happened to me when I hold the brush too far away as the paint dries and congeals in the air.

I started using an airbrush around two years ago or so and made following observations so far:


- a 30$€ amazon airbrush will do for starters. They are surprisingly good. But once you start using it more you want to invest in a better one like a harder & steenbeck evolution for ease of cleaning and wonderfull handling. Just dont buy the better ones, if you only basecoat with it. (Basecoating with airbrush >>> bc with shaker-can)

- the compressor is another thing. You want a compressor with an airtank, so your airflow does not pulsate. And buy a silent one for working late. Who wakes the baby takes it

- Vallejo airbrush colours are great! But you have to use them right. DO NOT try to use the metallics without shaking them properly and without discarding the first drop. Shaking properly: 2-4 minutes without steel balls or 1 minute with two (STAINLESS!!!!) steelballs. And even then, you want to dilute your colours sometimes, based on your pressure and tip-size.

- the optimal liquidity is something like milk. You should mix it with water/thinner as long, as it does not rinse of the wall of the mixing container. When it starts to rinse of the wall without sticking to it, you are fine.

- i use a 0.5mm tip for the Vallejo polyurethane basecoats and a 0.3mm tip for the rest. For ease of use i just leave my old china-airbrusch from amazon with the 0.5 tip and use my more elaborate equipment for finer details.

- Airbrusch-applied-colour is much thinner and more evenly distributed than brushed colour. It is very well suited for light colours, that do not cover well like white and yellow. It is not very well suited for fine details. Brush has no alternative here.

- If you buy an airbrush, do not forget to buy a cleaning pot and other cleaning equipment as well as a suitable filter-mask.

- You can use most of your normal paints with an airbrush without problem. No need to buy special ones. Just dilute the properly. Be aware that some colours are not to be used this way, because they contain dangerous substances like some yellow ones containing Cadmium.

I have some new toys* in the post so no doubt I will be adding questions to this thread soon.

*compressor and stuff to go with the badger patriot 105 I picked up.

Oh man, I need some of those Game Air colours!
There is some great advice in this thread already.

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Lord Elessehta Silverbough of Ar Yvrellion, Ruler of Athel Anarhain, Prince of the Yvressi.
Beastly member of The Mage Knight Guild.

Does anybody have some tutorial how effectively paint high elves with airbrush? I want to try it first, before I will ruin my units

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Galharen's painting blog

The winged hussar host - army blog

I do not use airbrush so not my experience, but Matt Cexwish (check out Painting Buddha's Academy) recommends to add a few drops of satin varnish to paints to mitigate this problem.

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Rainbows painting blog
Secret Santa 2016

The pop-up metallics happen mostly because of one of two causes:

- wrong pressure for the used liquid which leads to:

- wrong liquidity of the used medium. For more information refer to my above post. I personally would not take varnish as a thinner but the appropriate "thinner medium"(most of the time) or "airbrush thinner" (for the real "thick" cases).

I know nothing at all about airbrushes and how to use them, but here is a wonderful step-by-step airbrushed LSG.

http://volomir.blogspot.it/2011/07/high ... -step.html

Were you looking for something like this? if not, sorry for the misunderstanding

I found a channel on YouTube called "BuyPainted" which has some excellent videos on airbrushing. I used his technique for painting a frostheart and it turned out beautifully. I'm still very much a novice with the airbrush, but will be using it for my big guys for sure.

I finally managed to get my airbrush set up last night and have a quick play. It was really quite an experience and I think I have lots of playing to do to get going with it.

Does anyone have any suggestions on any good resources to basics one how to actually learn to paint with it?

I have seen loads of videos on equipment set up and I am addicted to Next Level Painting and Les Bursleys videos, but I wondered if there was anything out there to explain how to actually get going painting miniatures with an airbrush? Something in-between this ia a compressor this is a gravity feed and WOW! Awesome mini

For reference I have a badger patriot 105 and a TCP Global TC-20 masters compressor. For paint I am watering down P3 paints and I have the badger stynylrex primer.

I use a Iwata HP-CS as well, .35 nozzle.

Although this airgun gets recommended for miniatures, by a lot of websites, I'd rather have had a smaller nozzle, like some of the .20 or .21's (or even .15s-.18s) available. A HP-CS with .35 is nice - but it's just not accurate enough for some details. And for basecoating I use a spraycan, it's of course silly to let your airbrush choice be decided on that. And a CS can't be upgraded to a finer needle, unfortunately.

I use it a lot for Vallejo metals (I use them exclusively) and I never encounter your problem. The only thing i can imagine is that you haven't shaken the paint thouroughly, or you got a very very old bottle with clots. For the rest the CS is a very nice, forgiving airbrush and I wish you a lot of painting fun with it!

I have been having some initial adventures with my airbrush. I managed to get 25 5th ed Saurus base coated last night. I initially did a pale cream belly on them and then went over with a bluish skin colour. So for 2 hrs or so work not bad. I did learn a few things:

1) Don't place the compressor on the desk. This was a big one, partway through some priming it fell off after working it's way to the edge and the airbrush was ripped out of my hand. Fortunately no damage ensued but I did have a lot of cleaning up to do.

2) I need to keep cleaning the needle. I has an old tooth brush on hand that I kept just rubbing the needle on when it needed it. Is this the best way? or is there a better one?

3) Pressure? I didn't know what to use. It ended up being about 20 or 15 psi. both seems to work ok but I did feel a bit that the air was blowing paint around the model? Maybe I had my paint too thin?

4) the Badger stynylrex primer says it is good to go straight out of the bottle at 20 - 30 psi, it worked but did seem a little little thick to me, any other experiences with this?

5) I need to figure out that I actually need around me to hand and what not. I was running out of space.

6) It is very easy to pull the trigger back too much and dump way too much paint out. Even when I wanted to cover large area this seemed too much.

7) How is best to clean the airbrush between paints - it seems a lot of faff. In fact I seems to spend as much time cleaning the airbrush as I did painting.

There is a fine line between "thin enough" and "too thin", especially if you dilute with water.

But in the end it breaks down to "too much paint too fast". Try doing thinner layers of paint with more air and increasing the pressure to around 1,5-2 bar (21-29 PSI). Pressure may vary with paint used.

If you need to clean the needle you should make short cleaning pauses by brushing some "airbrush cleaner" every 5 minutes or so. That should not be tha case, though, if you use correct pressure and dilution.

1) I know

2) I hardly ever clean the needle, I just put some water in the can and then airbrush cleaner before using another colour.
Once a month I clean the whole thing. After 7 months I still encounter no problems.

3) Personally I work 22 or 23 psi. Generally people use 20-25 psi with "airbrush ready" paint and up to 40-50 with thicker paint.

4) I use cheap primer from a spray can .. so no experience with that!

6) You just need to practice a little more. You' ll get used to it!

7) Yes, I know the "problem": sometimes you're more busy cleaning than actually painting.
Personally I use both a normal brush (small parts and details that are too small for using an airbrush) and airbrush.

Here are my first attempts at using the airbrush.

Looks good. Very thin layer of paint applied, without loosing details.

I use an airbrush for majority of my basecoats on larger areas (cloaks, horses, armor, etc). I also use Vallejo Air Metallics and I've found that occasionally they separate so badly that no amount of shaking seems to fix the paint. I've had this happen specifically with the gold and copper paints, most notably the gold as it became very chunky and clogged the airbrush easily. They're generally very good but a couple of the colors are hit-or-miss, but as Eloras said it's possible I got an old pot.

Some airbrush tips I've picked up on the net and through friends:

- Use silly putty for masking, it does wonders for solid transitions between areas on a model and lets you do some cool stuff detail-wise
- Make sure your pressure is around 25-30 usually, if you need it higher that means you should thin the paint you're using with more medium
- For gravity fed, you can mix paint in the airbrush feed pot with some medium by covering the nozzle with your finger, it will make things bubble and mix up a bit in the pot
- It's very good practice to clean your airbrush either before or after every use; I clean mine after since the paint still has some moisture in it
- Practice a lot, it takes awhile to get decent at it!

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Visit me (Mut) at Nerdhammer: Just a bunch of losers playing with dolls

Decided to sticky this topic, since it is (or at least is starting to be) a lovely airbrush resource.

To add in some more stuff: Ulthuan.net topic about Video Tutorial - High Elves with Airbrush. Found by Swordmaster. Great video about what you can do with an airbrush and elves.

Rod

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Eirik wrote:

Please try to remember that, no matter how 'official' the source seems, rumours are basically just a dictionary combined with a random number generator

For Nagarythe: Come to the dark side.
PS: Bring cookies!

Check out my plog
Painting progress, done/in progress/in box: 167/33/91

Yeah, airbrush is very usefull but it needs a lot of skill, honestly
I'm learning using it all the time, but still I prefer to paint with brush:p
Airbrush is great to cover significant areas at one, as several cloaks, basecoats, base layers, but I can't control it while trying to make some more detailed highlights.
Maybe it's because I have just only a cheap version

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Galharen's painting blog

The winged hussar host - army blog

Same here. I find it very useful for basecoating and large surfaces. But once it gets to any kind of detail I need a brush. Looking at the video SM posted for instance shows what you can do with an airbrush. But that's way beyond my skill level.

Still though, for basecoats and large surfaces an airbrush saves me heaps of time. It's way faster then doing it by hand. So already for that it's a good investment. Especially if you paint as slow as I do.

Rod

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Eirik wrote:

Please try to remember that, no matter how 'official' the source seems, rumours are basically just a dictionary combined with a random number generator

For Nagarythe: Come to the dark side.
PS: Bring cookies!

Check out my plog
Painting progress, done/in progress/in box: 167/33/91

Volomir has some excellent tutorials about HE on his blog:

http://volomir.blogspot.com/

He mixes the use of airbrush and paint brushes. He also replies to emails pretty fast so you can always contact him directly with any particular questions.

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Twitter @SwordOfHoeth

High Elves MSU - Observations

Yeah, saw it a long time ago already.
Still it doesn't change my statement - pure skill matters

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Galharen's painting blog

The winged hussar host - army blog

Then keep practicing! How is that Dragon Guard coming up?

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Twitter @SwordOfHoeth

High Elves MSU - Observations

Maybe I will manage to take a quick photo today, still wip, but they have some potential;)
Tomorrow I'm attending a 2-days tournament so if I don't manage to make the photos today, you will see them on Monday:)

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Galharen's painting blog

The winged hussar host - army blog

Which ever one has the gravity feed haha.