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G'day all,

I'm trying to improve my painting skills, so got myself an airbrush and am looking for comments/criticism. This is my first airbrushed model, and I thought it came out pretty well. I tried to paint it as if it was lit from above, so I use P3 Iosan Green + black over a black undercoat for the main colour, then highlighted with pure Iosan green, focusing on surfaces that would be illuminated with a light shining from above. A couple of things I know are wrong:

1. Haven't drilled the barrel.
2. This is an old model that I repainted, I'm aware the mould lines haven't been cleaned very well and the paint on the shoulder pads is rough because I just sprayed straight over the rough paint that was under it.
3. I noticed when photographing there's a couple of random dark spots on the red, this is actually from the oil wash, it's not darker but rather it's slightly glossy, which makes it look darker because it doesn't diffuse as much light. I think I need to hit it with a satin varnish to smooth that out.

Beyond that, any criticisms and comments to further improve?

I think I may have overdone it with the black oil wash, it seems to have toned down the airbrush effect. Maybe a dark green oil wash would have worked better, then black oil wash just localised to the areas where I want high contrast like around the face?

Looks good for a first try. The few things I've seen about this technique (or a similar one) is to use an intermediate colour. So you have your dark base, then a lighter tone followed by your highlight. As it stands, the gradation between the dark and the light is pretty severe, especially on the helmet, but that could be the result of lighting.

I'm no expert mind you, my own attempt at zenithal highlights was using grey. I didn't have any of the blues I wanted to use originally... grey doesn't work so well.

The picture does exaggerate the transition slightly, but I probably could benefit from another colour. I've seen BuyPainted's videos where he paints the shade directly in to the crevices, I don't really have the brush control to do that, at least not yet, lol.

I actually undercoated it black with the intention of leaving some faint black in the shadows, but by the time I had laid down a decent layer of dark green, there wasn't really any shadows left so I just moved on to Iosan Green for the highlight, LOL.

Thanks for the tip though, I'll try and squeeze in another colour on the next batch.

I was actually wanting to use the airbrush for my Space Wolves, which are Mechanicus Standard Grey... but I figured green would come out better so just went with a DA instead. Might get some Dark Vengeance squads to paint up, or maybe I'll try and see if I can get anything decent looking out of my Space Wolves.


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I am struggling a bit with finer detail stuff (like the final highlight and such).

When you want to do something really fine, do you drop the pressure right down, get the needle really close to the model and work from there? Should the paint be thinner for fine detail work? I find I'm doing most my work at ~25psi, which seems to blow too much to do fine stuff, but then if I drop it below 20 it just sprays for half a second then clogs up and I have to turn up the pressure to clear it. I tried thinning a bit further, but then the air just blows the paint around after it's hit the model.

You can also check out Awesome Paint Job at YouTube. He shows a lot of stage by stage painting using the airbrush. You might review his Sons of Medusa video pretty closely since your shooting for a similar result.

That also looks very nice for your first figure.