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So I just got a new airbrush, first one. Luckily I'm not having any problems with spray quality, coats come out beautifully. My problem is the amount of paint! I never thought there would be a difference but wow, I'm using roughly 3 to 4 times as much paint to do the job with my air brush as I would manually. It's insane. It's this typical for air brushing? after searching online I can't find any references to this but wow, i thought the airbrush was expensive, at this rate I'll make up the cost of the brush by this time next year! Anyone have any advice or is the insane consumption of paint the dark unspoken secret of Airbrushing?

Play around with paint flow/pressure settings. Usually if the pressure is too high and the paint flow is too large, it consumes a lot more while still maintaining a decent coverage, so it's a matter of patience.

I find it's a bit of give and take, you do lose a bit to overspray and a bit just turns in to vapour and gets lost. But on the flip side I find I can apply much thinner coats by airbrush than by hairbrush.

So it kind of depends what I'm painting, large surfaces where overspray is minimal I probably use less paint with my airbrush than my hairbrush. Painting lots of small bits then yeah I waste a bit more paint. I do tend to waste a bit more paint when priming because the primer I use likes minimal thinning and high pressure, so a lot of it is lost as vapour.

But in general I don't find myself wasting a huge amount more paint with the airbrushes than the hairbrushes except in a few specific circumstances. e.g. If I'm spraying a thin line of yellow I have to mask to get a thin line but a ton of paint gets sprayed on the mask, and yellow being yellow takes a lot of paint so I really notice the bottles dropping quickly when I want to do a bunch of yellow or red pinstripes.