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People have been doing mini painting with airbrushes for awhile now, and in the past it sort of felt like there weren't that many airbrushers, and they were sort of still working back up to be as good as good brush painters. Over most of the past few years, it sort of felt like what made airbrushing good was that you could mass paint a whole army quickly.

But I've been noticing over the past some months now, though, that the number of good airbrush painters on dakka has exploded. People doing not just good work, but work that seems rather un-reproducable with brushes. A separate league of mini painting altogether. And I'm not just talking about airbrush-only techniques like ghost tinting either. Just regular painting and highlighting is better than brushes and washes. Or, moreso, when you do airbrushing and washing, and weathering, etc.

It's making me wonder if, if you're going to do painting "seriously", you more or less need to go out and get yourself an airbrush.

Airbrush is a tool, just like a paint brush, it has its strengths and weaknesses, just like a paint brush.

There are things that can be done with one but not both. both ways around.

If the effects that are only achievable with airbrush are something you want to achieve, then yes, you will need an airbrush.


On a technical point of view, airbrush beats paint brush on coverage, paint film thickness, drying time, economy of paint.

Airbrushing makes very good use of transparent colours, and underpainting much more than paint brushing does.

Its a different ball game mostly.

im saving my next Eldar army until i get an airbrush.. Ive seen some of the work done by guys that make that cool "Tron" look by blasting color into the seams and making the model look like its glowing...sooooper cool..

roughly speaking, you can do just about anything with a regular brush that you can do with an airbrush and vice versa. it's just a question of which tool is more efficient for the job. an airbrush isn't always the clear winner, especially when you start talking fiddly details and sharp lines.

I wouldn't say it's a required tool or the only way to go by any means, but for me it's a huge time saver. I only use it for base coating and varnishing right now, but it's worth it. it's also a tool that will grow with me, just like a regular brush, so over time I'll be able to do more with it.

Just regular painting and highlighting is better

This pretty much sums up why I went to an airbrush.

- Your priming and basecoat is super DUPER thin. You get all that nice color and it looks like pristine plastic. To me that's one of the fundamental differences between meh figures and the gorgeous ones.

- Highlighting highlighting highlighting. Shading and highlighting was the part that I always dreaded when it came to models. It takes FOREVER by hand and it's so easy to screw up with an incidental flick of the wrist. You go on youtube and it's just a bizarro ad-hoc collection of "this is how I do it" techniques with completely interchangeable terminology. F that. The way I look at it, an airbrush isn't a brush - it's a blending machine. That's why it's so valuable.

Since switching to airbrush my limiting factor has become detail painting. All the little bits and boobs. But those I think any one can do without having to be a technical genius.

Side note : switch to oils for washes and edge highlights for another gigantic boost in quality. With oils you can "erase" any mistakes you make trivially. This removes yet another "you can ruin the model unless you are a technical wizard" hurdle.

Im about to start air brushing, it seems the logical way to go.
I can spend 20 hours priming and basecoating a whole army by hand, or smack it out in 15 mins with an airbrush,

same with highlighting you can cain your highlighting so quick and because your production lining your technique it takes the brain out which means less mistakes.

i plan on doing all legs in one big run then all upper body in one run so im never changing techniques.

plus im planning grey knights so a uniform coat of metallic /drool lol

the only downside to airbrushing.
the cost!
a good set up will cost the same as a small mini army lol
but with all the advice out there
especially youtube, everyone uses the same techniques lol
so theres no more guy A does this Guy B does this and guy C thinks guy A's technique is rubbish

Why is it not meat... lol.

Anyways, it seems clear that there are a lot of things that airbrushing just does better, from a technique level (blending, OSL, etc.) to a fundamental level (no brush strokes, consistency of paint application (don't need to thin your paints)), which really does beg the question of what a brush does better. As mentioned, there are going to be really fine detail things, like faces, that you're probably still going to want a brush for...

... but for everything else, it's becoming plain to me that airbrushes are just becoming the next step, and that if you're not staying on the curve, you're getting left behind.

I mean, the last thing that did this was washes. I didn't use them when they came out, and thought that everyone saying "well, you should wash that and it will look better" to be dumb. Except they weren't. Washes just make things look better, for easier, and there isn't really an excuse to do things the old, hard, pre-wash ways.

I wonder how long it's going to be before someone posts something in the P&M showcase and the first comment will be "that looks nice, but it would look a lot better with just a little airbrushing".

If you want to paint seriously, yes you should get an airbrush - it's an excellent tool. Doesn't mean you need to use it to replace brushwork. You can, and for some things you're mad not to, but you don't need to to be a good painter. If you check any of the good painters on youtube, they'll generally use an airbrush for the same steps, laying down smooth basecoats and highlighting. Then they'll break out the brush.

I'm still learning, but I'm more on the airbrush side of things where possible. I'd rather OSL with an airbrush than layer up highlights with a brush. I try to do both to learn both though, I definitely need it ; p

 Ailaros wrote:
As mentioned, there are going to be really fine detail things, like faces, that you're probably still going to want a brush for...

Actually.... ; p It still needs some brushwork but it does look great with an airbrush.

 XdeadpoolX wrote:
Im about to start air brushing, it seems the logical way to go.
I can spend 20 hours priming and basecoating a whole army by hand, or smack it out in 15 mins with an airbrush,

same with highlighting you can cain your highlighting so quick and because your production lining your technique it takes the brain out which means less mistakes.

i plan on doing all legs in one big run then all upper body in one run so im never changing techniques.

plus im planning grey knights so a uniform coat of metallic /drool lol

the only downside to airbrushing.
the cost!
a good set up will cost the same as a small mini army lol
but with all the advice out there
especially youtube, everyone uses the same techniques lol
so theres no more guy A does this Guy B does this and guy C thinks guy A's technique is rubbish

Dunno about 20 mins lol if you want a very smooth even prime but I get what you mean.

I currently do commission painting and must say it would be impossible to make a OK amount of money without it. As brush work gives the same effects its more so do you want to spend 10 hours blending thay cloak or 3? I like most had an awful time when starting airbrushing. I found there was so many different things that can go wrong with an airbrush but once you get over that the this g is amazing.

Sorry if I got off topic abit xD

Yonan wrote: It still needs some brushwork but it does look great with an airbrush.

Neat video, though I'd note that he didn't do the eyes or the power leads. The fine detail work.

kronicpsycho wrote:I currently do commission painting and must say it would be impossible to make a OK amount of money without it.

That actually makes me wonder. I knew that GMM, for example, could chug out 30,000 points of grey knights in a month because of an airbrush, the speed making the throughput high enough for profitability, as you say.

But if airbrushes are slowly getting cheaper, and more people are using them, does that make you nervous as a commission painter? After all, once anyone can pump out a whole army in a month or two because they have a few skills and an airbrush, you'll go from doing something few people can do to doing something that everyone can do, except you do it a bit better. That switch from high value to marginal value must be a concern.

I would also add a note that I'm not 100% sure that airbrushing has sped me up. It has tremendously accelerated the basecoating and shading stages. But I feel like all that may have done is made me shift that extra time into painting all the details. I'm not absolutely sure of this, but it feels like it might be the case. I'll have to do a full squad of tactical marines to really get a good comparison.

In any case, I'm probably one of the world's slowest painters no matter what For reference, I've only done 2 units with an airbrush so far : 5 terminators and a dreadnought.

Cowbellicus wrote: But I feel like all that may have done is made me shift that extra time into painting all the details.

Well... that's the point.

Any person only has a finite amount of time and patience they're willing to put into a model. By using tools that make things easier it makes it so that you can have a better painted model because you spent the same amount of time on it, but were able to spend most of that time on the high-quality stuff.

I mean, when I started painting for real at scale back in 2005, you only had brushwork, and that was so time consuming that even good painters just didn't have the ability to get much further than the base coat and highlights. Go back and look at some of the golden demon winners from a decade ago, and you'll see what I mean. Now, if an airbrush can do in 10 minutes what it once took you 5 hours to achieve, that's 4 hours and 50 more minutes spent on detail work.

For reference, here's what one of the best mini painters in the world was able to produce 10 years ago:



And it was probably many dozens of hours of work. Someone with an airbrush could slam out this quality level in less than an hour, and spend the other 40 doing something else to improve it. It's like we're talking about a whole order of magnitude difference.

 Ailaros wrote:

Well... that's the point.

To some extent. A big chunk of the reason I bought my airbrush was because of the godawful amount of time it took me to complete anything. I'm the kind of person who has a hard time just slapping something together, so I get mired in the details. This means I tend to get a little OCD trying to make sure I'm doing the absolute best I can. Youtube and Dakka magnify this effect because of all the awesome stuff you see and all the info you have access to

For reference. I started painting October of last year (almost exactly 12 months ago). It took me 8(?) months to finish a 10-man tactical squad because I got mired in learning technique. It was a fun learning experience of course, and marine #10 is light years better than marine #1. For me it was shading/blending/highlighting that was the issue. There are SO many videos out there where people just seem to magic that stuff out of the ether, but it took me forever. I finally came up with a method that works for me (juicing) but it is agonizingly slow.

So, I bought my airbrush in August and since then I've finished a 5 man terminator squad and a dread. Both of those units are a good deal better than the tactical squad, and the shading/blending/highlighting steps were laughably quick. So I'm definitely faster, but it's hard to really compare because of the super slow learning process on my first units.

Also, I'm in Champaign too. High five o/\o

It's not a magic painting machine. If you get one believing it will be, you will be sadly disappointed. It's a specialised tool, with a fairly steep learning curve, especially when it comes to masking or stencilling.

The claims about the model above are also WRONG. The blend patterns on there are unsuited for airbrushing. Handwork is needed where handwork is needed.

Go watch videos by 'buypainted'. Very good examples of where to use and not use an airbrush for high end tabletop work.

winterdyne wrote:
It's not a magic painting machine. If you get one believing it will be, you will be sadly disappointed. It's a specialised tool, with a fairly steep learning curve, especially when it comes to masking or stencilling.

The claims about the model above are also WRONG. The blend patterns on there are unsuited for airbrushing. Handwork is needed where handwork is needed.

Go watch videos by 'buypainted'. Very good examples of where to use and not use an airbrush for high end tabletop work.

THIS ^

They are not miracle machines, and to use well, takes practice and skill.

Yes, of course, there are certain jobs that go amazingly fast with one (a base coasted a friend's tank with one of my airbrushes....he went out and bought one that day) - but as stated before, they are just tools.

I still do lots of detail work, I still uses washes and highlights....the airbrush is just another tool...and excellent for certain tasks...but it won't solve world peace, win you a golden daemon or get you a date with a prom queen.

Airbrushes are not new. They've been an important tool in real-world scale modeling for decades, this is just another case of the miniature wargaming community being slow to pick up something that everyone else has been doing for ages. They indisputably make getting a clean base coat easier, especially on vehicles and other kits with large flat surfaces. Just look at Forge World's IA:Model Masterclass book (from 2008) and you'll see that every step by step guide starts with airbrushing and doesn't stop until it's time to do the fine detail work and weathering (and even then there's a lot of airbrushing in their weathering).

The only reason not to have an airbrush available is the cost and space requirements. If you can afford to spend hundreds of dollars on a painting tool and don't need to paint at your cluttered desk then the choice is obvious.

I prefer airbrushing for base coats or my scale military models. When it comes down to 40k miniatures with multiple colours within half a square inch, I'd much prefer a good old paint brush. Otherwise you'll have to mask heavily AND be very accurate with the air brush.

Anything you can do with an air brush you can do with a good quality brush - it just takes much longer to do. However its good to remember that even the best airbrush using artists will still go back to a model and do final touch ups with a brush.

Is an airbrush essential to you? No. Will it make certain procedures easier to do? Yes. Is it worth investing in one? It all depends on what you are painting, how often you paint and whether or not you can afford one.

If you do go for an airbrush though, invest in the best you can afford at the time. If you can't afford a good quality airbrush and compressor just yet, wait, save up and THEN buy it as that will work out best in the long run for both yourself as an airbrush user and your wallet.

 gossipmeng wrote:
I prefer airbrushing for base coats or my scale military models. When it comes down to 40k miniatures with multiple colours within half a square inch, I'd much prefer a good old paint brush. Otherwise you'll have to mask heavily AND be very accurate with the air brush.

Pretty much this.

I love my airbrush, I am starting to get decent with it, and its wonderful for larger models like War Jacks/ Collasals/ Tanks ect. For your smaller individual troopers its awesome for priming and base coating but that's about where it stops being efficient.

As someone who is pretty new to air brushing I gotta say unless you love brush painting a LOT. Having even a super cheap air brush can produce good-V.good results in short time for things like base coats and vehicle striping and and shading and things like that. I got a 70$ tankless compressor and 50$ badger gravity fed airbrush and am able to base coat a squad in 5-10 minutes including setup.

So pretty much to echo everyone else. Is the air brush necessary? No it is not. Is it very helpful for quality and time savings? Yes. So for the price of a single battleforce I bought an airbrush that is allowing me to take 1/10'th the time on one of the major time sinks of mini painting while creating better quality on the jobs. So it's really up to the person of whether they rather paint for less time, or use the time savings to work extra hard on all the details.

With all that being said, after getting a taste for airbrushing i will be looking into buying a better setup and starting to push the envelope on what I can do with it. Especially for vehicles which I despise painting so bad.

 darefsky wrote:

 gossipmeng wrote:
I prefer airbrushing for base coats or my scale military models. When it comes down to 40k miniatures with multiple colours within half a square inch, I'd much prefer a good old paint brush. Otherwise you'll have to mask heavily AND be very accurate with the air brush.

Pretty much this.

I love my airbrush, I am starting to get decent with it, and its wonderful for larger models like War Jacks/ Collasals/ Tanks ect. For your smaller individual troopers its awesome for priming and base coating but that's about where it stops being efficient.

Yes and no. Space marines for example can be almost completely airbrushed if you part-assemble them. ie. my blood ravens with red armour and bone shoulders. Assemble legs, torso, arms if not magnetised. Fully complete the red with basecoat, highlights etc. Then fully complete the shoulder pads bone with highlights. Then do the minor detailing, stick on shoulders and done. Even a lot of more complicated models only need a little masking in order to airbrush the main bits. As mentioned above, Buypainted is a legend when it comes to this - I actually paid for his new subscription service (which has been great), he's that awesome.

Other races probably have a harder time with it, ie. Cadians will either require masking on every piece or part airbrush, part brush so it's much less ideal. Definitely doable though if you want the airbrush effects.

Chancetragedy wrote:
With all that being said, after getting a taste for airbrushing i will be looking into buying a better setup and starting to push the envelope on what I can do with it. Especially for vehicles which I despise painting so bad.

Yeah definitely. I started practicing with a cheap chinese airbrush which is now just for varnishing since I picked up a Badger Krome which I'm very happy with. I have one of the standard small, cheap tanked compressors (AS186 iirc?) and it's great. Having a tank to cut down on noise if nothing else is nice.

Well, and it's not a matter if if it's possible to replicate the results of an airbrush with a regular brush. Likewise, you don't NEED washes. But these two things seem to bring it to an entirely different level. The amount of time and skill it would take with a brush just to merely equal the results make it rather silly to make a comparison between the two.

And you could do cadians with an airbrush. Airbrush base the clothing, then mask the cloth and airbrush the armor. Glue it all together and brush basecoat flesh on the hands and face, and then give the hands and clothing a wash.

You could slam out a squad of 10 in a couple of hours, and with perfect shading and highlighting. Throw on a little weathering powder, and you'd get something that could compete at the golden demon level 10 years ago with just an evening worth of work.

Or, you could paint all the shading yourself in multiple steps, and then spend a weekend wet-blending, and trying to stiple on the weather effects, and get a likely worse looking single model that took you days to put together. Likely wouldn't have the time or patience to do any fine detail work or freehanding or anything either, after spending so much time doing such slow, futzy work.

It's interesting that the airbrush does seem to make such a strong case for paint-then-assemble, though.

 Ailaros wrote:
Or, you could paint all the shading yourself in multiple steps, and then spend a weekend wet-blending, and trying to stiple on the weather effects, and get a likely worse looking single model that took you days to put together. Likely wouldn't have the time or patience to do any fine detail work or freehanding or anything either, after spending so much time doing such slow, futzy work.

Couldn't have said it better myself. A poster above said: an airbrush is not magic......but for mere mortals (not giant Titan diorama painting archwizards ) it is quite magical in nature and can be a real motivational booster. Perhaps it's a little counterintuitive because it's easy to assume an airbrush is an "advanced" tool aimed at experts. But I think it's the exact opposite - a tremendous equalizer for the humble hobbyist. Kind of like how waaaay back in the day people never thought there'd be any use for computers for Joe Six-Pack in his home; nowawadays we know how transformative the PC is.

It's interesting that the airbrush does seem to make such a strong case for paint-then-assemble, though.

Absolutely. Legs + torso for most infantry is fine, but everything else you really want to paint in pieces and glue at the end. There's a big win in the "less random paint carelessly speckled around" department as a secondary effect as well.

Cowbellicus wrote:Couldn't have said it better myself. A poster above said: an airbrush is not magic......but for mere mortals (not giant Titan diorama painting archwizards ) it is quite magical in nature and can be a real motivational booster. Perhaps it's a little counterintuitive because it's easy to assume an airbrush is an "advanced" tool aimed at experts. But I think it's the exact opposite - a tremendous equalizer for the humble hobbyist. Kind of like how waaaay back in the day people never thought there'd be any use for computers for Joe Six-Pack in his home; nowawadays we know how transformative the PC is.

That's an interesting way of putting it. Moreso, because you could say the same for the last big deal innovation - washes. We still call washes "sorcery in a bottle" because it just magically makes things look good with comparatively little effort. As you say, it's an equalizer. With adequate brush skills and washes, you can make in minutes what once took people years of building up brush skills and several hours of painting to accomplish. Put another way, it allows new painters and lazy people to have pretty decently painted armies, rather than a sea of grey minis.

It did take me a few tries to get the hang of washes, and I could easily imagine it taking a weekend of watching youtube videos and fooling around with spare bitz to get basic proficiency with an airbrush, but once you have that, you now have access to models that look an entire class above where you could have been otherwise.

Oh, and an interesting note to the cost thing. It's the compressors, not the airbrushes themselves that are expensive, right? I was told some months ago by a person at my FLGS was that the way to handle this was to get a tire and pump it up to the (low) pressure that an airbrush works at and hook the brush up to that. In his case, his airbrush worked at like 20 PSI, so he got an old giant innertube from a tractor tire, would bring it to the local gas station, and pay a few quarters to pump it up to that pressure. After awhile, you've got to step on it or sit on it to keep the pressure up, but once it starts getting noticeably flat around 15 PSI, he'd just pay a couple more quarters to put more air in the tire.

Genius.

 Ailaros wrote:

Oh, and an interesting note to the cost thing. It's the compressors, not the airbrushes themselves that are expensive, right?

Well, for me the total setup was about $300 shipped. I think $190 was the compressor (Paasch D3000R), and the rest was airbrush (Iwata HP-CS) and associated support gear. I didn't go cheap, but the way I look at it - this isn't a hobby to be in if you care about "cheap" so mrh.

As a counterpoint, Buypainted (who is literally the Jesus Christ of airbrushing) suggests the exact opposite - go super cheap. I am in no position to argue with him:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXVmC2mfvPg

I will add this though : he is down on the piston compressors, but I really like mine. By default, it does get very very hot after about 20 minutes, but I bolted a beefy computer-case fan to it so it blows on the fins and it will run indefinitely for me and never really gets above "somewhat warm".

winterdyne wrote:
Go watch videos by 'buypainted'. Very good examples of where to use and not use an airbrush for high end tabletop work.

Thanks! I've seen his videos before and love his accent. (:

Buy sez to get the cheapest airbrush and the most expensive compressor. Okay, cheap I can do with a 40% off Michael's coupon. (:

For paint, can I use craft paint? I'm thinking zenithal "priming" on Bones miniatures (black, grey, white).

For the compressor, we have one of those big compressors to inflate car air tires. Will those work?

If so, I guess my main problem will be painting time. I usually paint late at night and don't want to wake up the neighbors or the others in the house with that loud compressor. Anyone else have this problem?

FWIW, here's my modified compressor. I made those little aluminum brackets that hold the fan to the compressor. I have it on a switch. Turn it on and that thing will run indefinitely. It's a pretty quiet little compressor too.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

ced1106 wrote:

For paint, can I use craft paint? I'm thinking zenithal "priming" on Bones miniatures (black, grey, white).

I tried Createx paint and it is total garbage (even after 24 hours, mild rubbing with a finger will flake it. In my experience : Vallejo Model Air > Vallejo Model Color > Citadel Layer paints. Model Air doesn't need thinning, but I use Liquitex Airbrush Medium for everything else. I use the liquitex for thinning even when doing regular brushwork - no more water for me. It's a convenient one-stop shop.

There are a TON of threads on paint, do a few searces and you will get a lot of information on it - while airbrush qustions are asked about once a week...the paint question comes up monthly.

Short answer regarding craft paint: no.

If you can get it, the least hassle and most consistent use is actual arirbrush paint - and hobby level airbrush paint (i.e. not the stuff for painting real cars....they use much largers needle sprays).

yes, while you can thin almost any paint, acual airbrush paint will give you better and more consistent results.

Actual airbrush paint has two distinct advantages;
it is properly thinned (yes, you can try this your self with proper thiners).
the pigments are of higher quality and more finely ground...they will work better in the smaller needle airbrushes.

I prefer either miniataire or vallejo model air, but some people like the new testors aztek. Golden brand is also very good.

Do some searches, there is a lot of info on this out there already.

 Ailaros wrote:
Well, and it's not a matter if if it's possible to replicate the results of an airbrush with a regular brush. Likewise, you don't NEED washes. But these two things seem to bring it to an entirely different level. The amount of time and skill it would take with a brush just to merely equal the results make it rather silly to make a comparison between the two.

And you could do cadians with an airbrush. Airbrush base the clothing, then mask the cloth and airbrush the armor. Glue it all together and brush basecoat flesh on the hands and face, and then give the hands and clothing a wash.

You could slam out a squad of 10 in a couple of hours, and with perfect shading and highlighting. Throw on a little weathering powder, and you'd get something that could compete at the golden demon level 10 years ago with just an evening worth of work.

Or, you could paint all the shading yourself in multiple steps, and then spend a weekend wet-blending, and trying to stiple on the weather effects, and get a likely worse looking single model that took you days to put together. Likely wouldn't have the time or patience to do any fine detail work or freehanding or anything either, after spending so much time doing such slow, futzy work.

It's interesting that the airbrush does seem to make such a strong case for paint-then-assemble, though.

No. You can airbrush the fatigues, yes, but then it's brush work if you want to be efficient. You are not considering how difficult it is to apply a mask correctly. Rushed, the bleed you get under the mask edge will bugger up all your work and thus actually lead to a longer, more stressful job. Masking and stencilling are where the learning curve goes up very sharply indeed.