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This post will probably get me banned from the forum but I have to ask/know: what type of airbrush does everyone use around here for painting GW minis? I bought a Badger Omni 5000 and a cheap-ass compressor on line but can't get the detail fine lines/area spray I see happening on people tutorials. I can't seem to find any decent books on the subject either. So I'm reduced to brush painting and drooling over what I see being done on the tutorials. Please help!
Not sure how this will get you banned... but
I use an Iwata Neo
I'm still fairly new with it, but mostly it's just practice to figure out what your airbrush can do. It also helps to lay something over the parts you don't want paint on, such as some simple masking tape.
some things that really help me out is keeping it as clean as I can and using a dual action to try and control the spray the best I can.
I'm expecting an Imperial Knights supplement dedicated to GW's loyalist apologetics. Codex: White Knights "In the grim dark future, everything is fine."
"The argument is that we have to do this or we will, bit by bit,
lose everything that we hold dear, everything that keeps the business going. Our crops will wither, our children will die piteous
deaths and the sun will be swept from the sky."
-Tom Kirby
I use one made by a company called Runway 13.
It is my first airbrush, so I can't really compare it with any others, but I really like it. Came with 4 different sized needles and seems capable of doing very nice fine lines.
I run it with with a compressor I bought from an auto tools type store.
I have / had the same question but was too lazy to ask it and too impatient to wait for an answer lol. So I ordered an Iwata HP.BCS as well as a 0.35mm tip & needle and a side mount cup for undercoat and larger parts and also an Iwata HP.BH with a 0.2mm tip and 1.9ml cup for finer details. I already had a large air compressor and filters etc. Will see how they go when I get them.
From what I did read, the Iwata HP.BH seems like a really good option for painting minis but so far I have zero experience.
i am still gathering up parts and such to give airbrushing a try ... will be using a walmart compressor with a good regulator and water trap ... ordered a lower cost off brand to start just getting used to a dual action and such while i save up for a name brand unit... not sure if i will try to spray anything other then water and maybe a small amount of ink through the cheap one.
I just based striking scorpions last night using zenithal shading. Turned out really well. As far as i can tell, my limited painting skills wouldn't be able to shade this smoothly without the airbrush.
I have a small tank compressor and added an iwata pistol grip moisture trap.
One piece of advice I have is this,
CLEAN IT OFTEN! If you think its clean, clean it again.
also THIN YOUR PAINT! skim milk is the consensus.
I use an Iwata HP-C Plus and an Infinity CR, pasche compressor. I use Tamiya Airbrush cleaner to clean the brush and a squeeze bottle with water to spot clean in between color changes. Tamiya cleaner is by far the best but its a solvent and will swell the Oring in the iwata under the trigger. So beware of this, remove the oring when doing a serious clean. Infinity does not suffer from oring swelling.
Buy a few needles and lots of orings. Nothing worse than bending a needle or tearing an oring and waiting for parts.
As for getting really fine lines, get up as close as possible to the model and be careful with the trigger, over spray is very simple to do and can ruin all of your work. I blu-tac all my models together, and piece paint them and glue after - its easier to recover from a mishap if you use this method. I've also found using higher pressure for brighter colors.
Hope this helps.
Eclipse
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2013/09/26 14:38:44
I'm fairly new at this airbrushing lark too, but for fine lines I find the best thing to do is a 3-step approach:
1) Turn the air-pressure down as low as you can and still be able to spray,
2) remove the nozzle-cap, leaving the needle exposed
3) get as close as possible to the mini
I got a lot of really good feedback after posting that article so I hope to get around to updating it with some of the really great comments I got soon.
Good luck!
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. Marx (Groucho, not Karl).
I figured this was probably a pretty stupid question but I just don't see a lot of literature on the subject other than a few "how to's" from the fine scale modeler and they don't seem to have the detail based on questions/issues I keep running into.
Not at all a stupid question, necron99, but it is one that gets asked pretty frequently. Have you tried searching for previous threads? Lots of suggestions/reviews already available on Dakka, let alone the internet, at large.
Personally, I'm using a Masters G44 - dirt cheap (found one for $20 through Amazon, and they don't usually go for much more than that), built pretty solidly, and has a few available sizes of needle/nozzle (comes with .35mm, also grabbed a .5mm when I ordered it). That said, I don't think I'd recommend it, for a few reasons.
First is build quality. While the thing is solid, the machining in a few places is pretty crude. The rim of the hole at the base of the color cup has lots of burrs which shred cotton swabs and paper towels when trying to clean it out. There are also alignment issues with the nozzle and air cap (on mine, at least) - I can't use one of my needle/nozzle sets without sputtering and I can plainly see the asymmetrical spray pattern.
There are also a few bits of the general design that I don't like. For one, the MAC valve. Unless you've run hose through a wall and are working in a separate room from your compressor, it's just not necessary (even then, you could use an in-line regulator to better effect). It seems to throttle down the pressure, even when fully open, making my poor little compressor work extra hard. I also can never tell what pressure I'm actually using, when it comes time to troubleshoot - my compressor-side regulator could read 30 PSI and I could be spraying at 17.
Finally, the needle seal (forgive me if I'm using the wrong term here - the bushing that the needle passes through which keeps paint from leaking back into the trigger assembly) is ill-positioned. It's recessed, by a few mm, from the opening at the bottom of the color cup. Paint just loves to collect there and it's nearly impossible to clean, being a very narrow channel running perpendicular to a moderately narrow hole at the base of a tapered cup. I try to flush it out, as best I can, but I still get troublesome buildup - sometimes it causes the needle to stick after the brush has been left, for a while.
The Dreadnote wrote:But the Emperor already has a shrine, in the form of your local Games Workshop. You honour him by sacrificing your money to the plastic effigies of his warriors. In time, your devotion will be rewarded with the gift of having even more effigies to worship.
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