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Hi guys,

i bought me an airbrush last week and started to do some work as a question arose.
How do brush hard edges? As a (New) tau player my painting consists of painting edges...

How can I avoid getting paint into those little recesses which our army has lots of.

there are a lot of drones sitting on my desk waiting to be painted...

To paint them I just covered them in a black coat (grey primer first), then I applied white to the outer rim and
oversprayed the white rim with red. then I covered the middle of the disc in black again (where I messed up) with a normal brush.

Is there a more effective way to do this? Should I use masking film (but cutting it in an appropriate shape would take forever..)?

Thanks for your help.
cutter

Normally you would mask the hard edge with a tightly rubbed down piece of masking tape. That is a major PITA and hard to do around curves, of course.

To do a whole load of drone you might be able to paint the middle first, then the rim (masking the top with a piece of material that you hold in place by hand, then fill the seam with brush painted-in liquid paint or even use a micro felt tip pen to fill it.

You can use silly putty to mask it off if you want, but I think your current technique is probably as fast as you're going to get. Airbrush is a great tool, and a diverse one too, but you're not going to be able to use it to paint the entire model. As much as I wish that were true...


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And really, I've been contemplating ways to do the same thing, I think I may actually wind up borrowing your technique.

Hard outer can be hit with an airbrush (by rotating the model so that only the edge of the spray hits he model. However, inner edges, in my opinion, are generally a waste of time if you're trying to achieve ant sort of display, studio, or competition quality model because the effort required to eliminate overspray exceeds the time it takes to use a paintbrush.

If you are interested only in satisfying requirements to play a model, you can catch many edges by spraying perpendicular to the edge and using a piece of cardboard (like business card) to catch overspray. A thin aluminum shield (prep it with primer it gesso first so it absorbs paint) may help too. When you're done , hit it with a glaze or wash to soften it.

The upside to this is that once practiced, it is pretty quick. You can also get a zenithal type effect without extraordinary effort. The downside is, it is highly recognizable as airbrush, and the edges are inconsistent (which is an aesthetic I don't like). Plus, it only works on power armor type miniatures, or minis dominated by a single color and highlight. For instance, it would work well on a tactical space marine, but badly on the new blood angels librarian, due to the intricate derails and widely varying colors.

Personally I would prefer to use a paintbrush and leave a hard edge, or feather or wet blend or layer 2 highlights.

Suks wrote:
You can use silly putty to mask it off if you want.

Silly putty (or blue tac) tend to be a bit soft on the edges unless you use a clay shaper or other tool to really flatten them out. It is a bit too amorphous to get a really tight edge, without a bit more effort. Good when doing camo - bad for crisp masking. To complicate things - he has a fairly mechanical set of lines to follow as opposed to just random blobs. It ends up taking more than a little time to work around those edges and corners and seal it down. Depending on how fast he wants to go - it can be a bit slower than he might want to do it.

A bit faster - but along the same train of thought would be to use liquid mask. It lays down smoother, and you get a nice crisp line. You can paint it on pretty fast too, as you don't have nearly the same concerns of getting an even color - just complete coverage. Paint edge color, liquid mask, paint body color, remove liquid mask.

Somewhat more time consuming to start with but very fast once you get setup would be to do plotted friskets or a custom shield. The shape of the drone is domed - but most the edge is on the same plane. If you create a file for a vinyl cutter of sorts (I use a Silhouette) you can cut several dozen flexible stencils that you can quickly apply and treat as the liquid mask above. The shields work in the same way (cut my custom ones out of either 0.1mm silicone or more often overhead projector sheets). Align, paint, carefully lift. The frisket requires more setup, but less practice to get the crisp lines. The shield you can cut by hand if you need to easily enough, but if you haven't used them before - it can take a bit of practice. Both require a bit of setup, so unless you have a couple dozen or more - they may not be worth the effort.

Honestly though - for most people, the fastest way will be to paint the body color, paint the edges with an airbrush as carefully as you can, clean up the body color with a hand brush and then refine the definition with an ink in the panel lines. Very fast, very simple, very easy. The trick is to not worry about a little paint overspray in the panel lines and embrace the concept of shading them. Once you do that - Tau become very easy to paint en masse.

Typically, hard edges in airbrush schemes are counter-shaded in the same way as panel lines. Then, when drybrushed (or edge highlighted), the edge stands out with higher contrast, making it look sharper and harder.

They also have masking fluid you can paint on, and it peels off easily when you're done

You have to mask for hard lines with airbrush.

Masking fluid, stencils, tape, silly putty, blue tac, all good for it.

Hard lines are more easily produced with a brush, even more so at our scale.
You could paint the figure in grey scale, and then use candy colours to colour it in over the top. all the pre shade would show through, and colour depth is built up with thin layers.

Creating my own round masks sounds pretty hard to do for the current me. I think the masking fluid would fit me better.
I'll give it a try.
thanks for all your help and suggestions!

As someone who has painted his tau with a lot of airbrush use, I either;

1 - paint the edges by hand
2 - Just paint them and clean up overspray by hand.

Best of luck!