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I got a Master Airbrush gravity fed airbrush for christmas.
I set it up with the included compressor, and put some thinned Citadel black in it to prime my Night Scythe. The Night Scythe recieved a black wash. I washed the airbrush, and put in non-thinned Citadel black. The airbrush worked fairly well, but did not have a large enough area of application to prime quickly. I (very slowly) finished priming the Scythe, and eventually the airbrush stopped spraying. Air was still coming out, but no paint was exiting the nozzle. I washed the airbrush again, and finished priming.

Next, I tried spraying on Leadbelcher. A tiny bit came out, and then it stopped spraying again. When I stopped pulling the trigger, the metal thing holding the tube to the compessor violently disconnected with a popping noise. The metal connection parts of the hose stayed on the brush, but the rubber length of the hose was disconnected.

I used soapy water to clean the brush. Please help.

Use windex or a specialized airbrush cleaner to clean it, not soapy water.

Also, you've gotta thin your paints man, I've literally never had my citadel paints get stuck, including spraying lead belcher, because I thin to a milk like consistency.

Good luck with your airbrush endeavours!


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https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCBpnrOqQtw0q8e3ET10-hp_Vd9suOzri

Watch this guy's videos, that's where I learned the majority of my airbrush maintenance and general knowledge.

I'm a newcomer to airbrushing as well, and have run into most of what you have.

Your first mistake was to paint on a model first. Spray onto some paper, newspaper, card stock, anything other than those expensive minis Get a real feel for how the brush works before touching a model. If you can't make a piece of paper a uniform grey by spraying black at it, you probably aren't ready to prime a model with an airbrush.

Is your Master brush a dual action? Gravity fed is nice, but it's the dual action that's the first key to success. Dual action allows you to feather the amount of paint coming out of the tip.

Thinning the paints is pretty much a necessity. Even using Vellejo Model Air, I thin them down a bit. Just how thin you have to go depends mostly on the needle size you're using, and the effect you're going for. Mine is a .35mm.

The black wash effect you got was from thinning too much. The dry tip (air coming out, but no paint) is from not thinning enough. With GW paints, I'd start with roughly 50/50 paint/thinner (I use Vellejo paint thinner - works great, but distilled water is good too). This ratio is not set in stone, especially with GW paints. Their decision to NOT use dropper bottles is a serious facedesk.

Blowing metals through the airbrush is tricky. GW paints have rather large flecks of metal in them, so if you're using a small needle, it's gonna clog up FAST.

So all that said: I'll boil it down a bit:

Step 1: Start with Chaos Black. Thin 50/50 with your fluid of choice
Step 2: Practice on a piece of white paper
Step 3: Adjust thinning ratio and observe effects
Step 4: Clean the brush regularly while using

Repeat step 2 LOTS. Airbrushing is not nearly as easy as the youtubers make it look. As for step 4, I keep a Q-tip soaking in a little airbrush cleaner. Use the Q-tip (cotton swab, w/e) to GENTLY clean the needle tip while using. If you can see any dried paint on the tip, stop what you're doing and clean it off. Adjust your thinning ratio if you got less than 30 seconds of spray time.

Hope this helps a bit.

airbrush paint consistency needs to be thinner. it can be infuriating when you spray and it washes the miniature like you say..what you need to do here is look at a few things. the first is your spray pressure. when i first got mine it was on 40 and i didnt have a clue about it. ive since changed it to about 20 psi, maybe less for smaller amounts. the second is your own trigger control. having the trigger mashed down is rarely useful as the paint will come out much too fast and result in the aforementioned washing. you need to place gradual pressure on both the downwards and the lateral movement of the trigger, to get the right pressure and paint amount for your desired effects. these are only things that will come with time and practice though.


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also, invest in airbrush thinners. i use this to clean my airbrush components aswell once im done, aswell as a thinner

This might help:

Nice vid, but if I were to try spraying at that thickness, I'd end up with dry tip or a clog rather quickly. You could do it with a full-on blast to do base coating, but finer controls would be a nightmare with a small nozzle at that consistency. Start with 50/50 paint/thinner with the citadel stuff and see how it works with your brush and adjust as required. Base paints are considerably thicker (love them tho) so need to be thinned even more for airbrush work.

Regardless of the paint I always thin based on the spray I want to produce. I pick a pressure I want to spray at (usually just a guess based on the distance I plan to spray from) and then put a few drop of thinner in the cup followed by the paint. If it splatters, it's too thick, thin it further. If it pools, it's too thin, thicken it further. If it spits (which I think of differently to splatter, lol) then it's either way to thin and needs to be thickened up or I'm trying to spray at too low of a pressure (which usually resulted in my going too thin) and need to crank it up a bit higher.

Once I'm pretty happy I just fine tune the pressure (so basically I pick a pressure, get the viscosity close, then do the fine tuning with pressure adjustment rather than trying to fine tune the viscosity because it's easier to do that way).

It can also pool if you're simply spraying too close and/or spraying the same location for too long, so if you find you simply can't find a good consistency for what you're trying to do, it's entirely possible that you lack the skill or are attempting to do something you can't actually do.

But yeah, I think the best thing is to tune your paint thinning and pressure based off the spray pattern rather than anything else.

It's never been much use to me when people show videos of how to thin because it's really hard to see how it's flowing. It's only really useful when you yourself have already found the correct consistency and you can use brushing it up the side of the cup as a reference for yourself.

I also find the "milk like consistency" to be mostly meaningless Milk behaves quite differently to paint, different surface tension and all, so even if you poured some milk in to a cup to try and guess it's viscosity it's hard to then translate that to a paint consistency because it behaves totally different. Not to mention I think "milk" varies in consistency from place to place, what I think of when I buy "milk" off the shelf is waaaay too thin.

Basically, practice. Get a sheet of cardstock (or 12) and try to make it uniform grey with black paint. Once you can do that you should have a good handle on your brush and what the paint should look like. Then you can try doing lines

 nightwynd wrote:
Basically, practice. Get a sheet of cardstock (or 12) and try to make it uniform grey with black paint. Once you can do that you should have a good handle on your brush and what the paint should look like. Then you can try doing lines

That's a good idea, though personally I'd recommend not using card stock but rather getting some plastic and priming it so you have a similar surface. Card is a LOT easier to paint than plastic models, one of the first things I learned while airbrushing was "why can I produce really nice lines on this cardboard box I'm using as a spray booth but they never work on the model itself... oh, it's because card absorbs paint so my margin for error is huge compared to a plastic model that won't absorb excess paint".

It can be worth while using a sheet of plasticard as the base of your spray booth so that you can test pressure/consistency/spray distance on it before ever touching the model itself.

I just did exactly the same thing you did. I was using testors Airbrush black and clogged my new master brush right away.

I think, assuming you have a dual action, sending air first then actioning the paint will leave less paint in contact with the needle and reduce clogging.

I have also warmed to practicing on minis. Do it while Basecoating with your base color. It lets you get a feel with your final medium and you are going to cover it up anyway. I started practicing some highlighting black on plastic, then just covered it up after trying a few things.