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Hey I'm just starting to get into airbrushing and I'd like to know what the most needed Model Air paints are. I have around 60-80 dollars to spend on airbrush paints. What would Dakka recommend?

Depends on what colours you intend to paint. Generally, I would say black, white, metallic gun, metallic chrome, and metallic rust.

You can build a lot on top of these if you complement them with red, blue and green.

Well Vallejo "model air" is nice.

Badger makes some nice paints but some are hit or miss.
(i love there black as it is not the darkest black)

Otherwise really any paint will do so long as you learn the art of thinning the paint.

If you are just starting, get most of your paints that are designed for an airbrush, so Vallejo model air or badger minitaire.

Get a few other colours in normal paint so you can learn to thin them

Depends what you'll be painting. For general flexibility (same as brush painting), the basics should include the primaries, black, and white, obviously, but I would also add a small range of browns (dark/burnt, terracotta, and a lighter tan). For wargame painting, and because the VMA versions are so nice, a range of metallics wouldn't go amiss, either.

Beyond that, I would first focus on important faction colors, if you have any. When branching out within color families, bear in mind that it's more important to get bright, highly saturated versions of colors if you want to get the most mileage from mixing - you can darken colors relatively easily, but making them brighter without turning them pastel with white? Good luck...

To round out the purchase, I'd pick up as many of the common secondary/tertiary colors as you can afford, focusing on what you expect to use most frequently. I paint a lot of green, for example, so it was well worth having a range of greens, even though I could mix them from blues and yellows. Purple, however, I use rather infrequently, so I only recently picked up a single bottle, mostly to test out a new brand.