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Hello All!

I am new to painting and have been trying to expand my capabilities as much as possible and I have quite a few vehicles (40K Imperial Guard) and was wondering what the best airbrush for beginners is and/or best overall airbrush. Any lists or info on this would be greatly appreciated! And if there is any particular thread on getting into airbrushing with tips and tricks!

Thank you guys!

Don't cheap out and get a "beginners" airbrush.. you'll get frustrated. Buy something of solid quality, that will last. You won't ruin it as long as you're careful to clean it out after each use. I started with an Iwata HP-CS, and have never regretted that choice.

Thanks Horst! I will definitely lollipop into that one. How long have you had that one?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Look into* not lollipop, whoops, posting whole mobile hah.

I'm a beginner with an airbrush as well. I bought the Badger Patriot 105 and love it so far, my only frustration is that the nozzle cap came tighter than i can undo by hand( an impressive feat). I need to get some good pliers with soft teeth.

I will say its a pretty steep learning curve, but if you are patient you can get some really nice effects. I took a box and practiced getting different spreads, different PSI, splattering, and a lot of writing my name in cursive. then i went on to spraying some table quality terrain for my pathfinder games. havent tried it on miniatures yet, but ive been eyeing up my big dragons for a while now haha

I definitely agree with not getting a cheapo airbrush. Go straight for a badger or iwata hp-cs or something similar. Hobby lobby carries the hp-cs last time I checked and you can use their 40% coupon on it.

I think the best thing to do for a beginner would be to have someone who knows what they're doing show you the basics. It's one of those things that takes a lot of practice and tuning. It can be extremely frustrating at first, but the payoff is worth it.

Anotherguardsman. There is nothing wrong with being cheap. That is as long as you know what your getting. My badger airbrush got ruined decades ago & I didn’t have the $$$ at the time to replace it. I went to harbor freight tools & got a dual action airbrush that looked almost identical to what it had. It was $20. I took it home it worked just like my old badger. Then when I was taking it apart to clean it after use I realized the parts interchanged. I’ve been using that airbrush for over 20 years. Haven’t had a problem since. I haven’t needed a compressor, but the ones they sell look good & reasonably priced. That’s my 2 cents good luck. Don’t ask me about paint I will never use acrylic/water based paint

How are you with resources ?
If you got money to burn and lots of space get a good top of the range airbrush and compressor. If you break anything you can just replace it.

I would advocate buy a cheap compressor/airbrush combo off amazon. You can learn the ropes with airbrush use, how to optimise your set up, cleaning maintenance etc..

You can always upgrade the airbrush once you feel you need better performance. Especially for vehicles you don't really need high precision.
I used a cheap £15 Airbrush & compressor set for months before upgrading to Iwatta Neo still using the same compressor.

 Horst wrote:
Don't cheap out and get a "beginners" airbrush.. you'll get frustrated. Buy something of solid quality, that will last. You won't ruin it as long as you're careful to clean it out after each use. I started with an Iwata HP-CS, and have never regretted that choice.

This is seriously the best airbrush I've ever owned. The first and last airbrush you'll ever need for 40k and really any hobby modeling application.

Also worthwhile is investing in a nice silent compressor but that can get expensive fast.

 shrew wrote:
Anotherguardsman. There is nothing wrong with being cheap. That is as long as you know what your getting. My badger airbrush got ruined decades ago & I didn’t have the $$$ at the time to replace it. I went to harbor freight tools & got a dual action airbrush that looked almost identical to what it had. It was $20. I took it home it worked just like my old badger. Then when I was taking it apart to clean it after use I realized the parts interchanged. I’ve been using that airbrush for over 20 years. Haven’t had a problem since. I haven’t needed a compressor, but the ones they sell look good & reasonably priced. That’s my 2 cents good luck. Don’t ask me about paint I will never use acrylic/water based paint

I don't see a huge difference between $20 airbrushes and top-of-the-line ones either.
The main problem with cheap airbrushes is that the nozzle is usually very brittle (you have to be very careful not to over-tighten it), and the seals tend to break down relatively fast. If you can get replacements for cheap it's really not an issue, but sometimes you can't find spare part for no-name airbrushes.

I started with a cheap tankless compressor, and it worked okay. Not the best for priming (as many primers, especially white, tend to go on better with higher pressures) or fine details, but it could do most of the job. Upgrading to a better one with a tank really helps with the noise, and also with cleaning (you can blast a lot of air at a high pressure easily).

And for the first tries you'll do with your airbrush, try to stay away from very light colors, especially whites (and that includes white primer), as they're prone to speckling, which can be frustrating and confusing when you start out as it's hard to understand what's going wrong.

It really depends on what you will mainly be using the airbrush for. I have a nice gravity feed Iwata that does tiny details, but I have a hard time justifying breaking it out do do a few tiny things - i just use a normal paint brush. However, for base coating and large areas, the airbrush is a god send. This is what I mainly use an airbrush for personally. And, the cheap one i got years ago (single action) for about $15 at a tool discount freight store does the job perfectly.

Now, I would never give up my Iwata when I want to do detail work, but would not want to put it through the strain of big areas with the more tedious cleaning needed.

So, my advice is if you are looking for one to do both tiny details and large fast coverage, you are better off with two brushes and a cheap one for big work is perfectly fine.

Also, just my personal preference, I do not like to shoot acrylics through my fine airbrush - only inks and thinner-based enamels since it makes it much easier to clean. Acrylics dry very hard and no amount of water will clean it off.

 MDSW wrote:

Also, just my personal preference, I do not like to shoot acrylics through my fine airbrush - only inks and thinner-based enamels since it makes it much easier to clean. Acrylics dry very hard and no amount of water will clean it off.

100% acetone (nail polish remover) will remove dried acrylic paint. I use Q-Tips and an airbrush cleaning kit (with those really thin pipe-cleaner scrubbers) to clean those hard-to-reach areas.

Also, don't let paint dry in an airbrush lol. Clean it often and after each session makes them much easier to clean.

In regards to painting white don't paint white using white paint in your AB.

Use white ink. Daler&Rowney make a white ink. It's semi-opaque so you can control how much it covers for nice gradual zenithal highlights and because it's an ink and as thin as water there is zero speckling (also because pigment in inks is way finer than pigment in paint).

Over black it'll take a few layers but the beauty is you can go from black to grey to white without having to use a 3rd color.

Being acrylic it also cleans a little easier than paint.

My 2 cents

I am a self confessed air brush junkie.

I have no less than six.

But the one I reach for most frequently is the one I also recommend "if you can only have one gun" and thats the Badger 105 (aka Patriot). My H&S Evolution is better, but just not as versatile due to its narrow throat. I can do almost anything with the Badger.

The second piece of advice I give: plan to spend at least 2x as much on compressor as you do on the airbrush. Seriously, its more important than the gun. Give me a piece of poop knock off airbrush with a decent air source and I can still lay down credible free hand camo. But even a Harder & Steenbeck Infinity (arguably the best airbrush ever made) coupled with a spare car tire for air is going to result in crap work, guaranteed. I should know: when I bought my first gun a couple decades ago, for several years I stubbornly used a car tire. The day I got a simple piston compressor my world changed. When I got another with reservoir, I started winning awards.

3rd piece of advice: buy a 3M 7500 respirator (dont argue, just do it) and figure out SOME way to extract air from the room you are working in.

I have this. The Master Series brushes are china manufactured and based on the Iwata designs.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009YNG21U/ref=sspa_dk_detail_4?psc=1&pd_rd_i=B009YNG21U&pd_rd_w=NuvdS&pf_rd_p=8a8f3917-7900-4ce8-ad90-adf0d53c0985&pd_rd_wg=5y4x1&pf_rd_r=G6FGKWS6C0JWHE26G2N3&pd_rd_r=2b6d86b7-9f57-11e9-9f99-b9a631ef7c24

I still uses these brushes. It worked great for years.

I recently got a larger tank and compressor that is quite because of baby.

I would advise against dropping a couple hundred bucks on a airbrush and then another 100 on a compressor.

Airbrushing is a skill, a lot of people think it will be the magic maker.

Start out and get the basics down. Then you can always get a better brush or compressor down the line. The experince will help you get a feel for what type of brush you want and what you mainly use it for. I have a primer brush (crappy one), basecoat brush (master series .5 needle) and a detail brush which has 3 different needle size, .5,.3,.2 which I use mostly with .3.
I've gotten plenty of great comments about my figures from using these "cheap china brushes". I wouldn't worry about name brand recognition at the moment.

Think of it this way, when you started painting your minis, did you go strait to a Winsor Newton series 7 brush? Hell no, you probably used some cheap bulk brush set from hobby lobby.

As far as tips, watch Next Level Painting on Youtube and Twitch. It helps out a lot once you accept Kenny B gansta personality lol.

I bought a cheap brush on eBay. It’s great. However, I also bought a cheap, non-adjustable compressor. That makes life a lot harder, and for fine detail it’s hopeless. That’s not what I use it for though.
Large areas,uniform cover on vehicles, blending- blending shadows in cloaks looks particularly good and I have white to dark blue blended my dire avengers. They look great.

If anyone has a recommendation for an adjustabke compressor, I’d be interested!

 Sunsanvil wrote:

3rd piece of advice: buy a 3M 7500 respirator (dont argue, just do it) and figure out SOME way to extract air from the room you are working in.

Yeah, I use a filter booth and a mask and I still want to feed the booth out of the house. I have to slow down priming and basecoating to give the filter booth a chance.

Tikay Fortooun wrote:
If anyone has a recommendation for an adjustabke compressor, I’d be interested!

There are four categories of compressors:
1) Non-airbrush compressors
2) Airbrush compressors without tank/reservoir
3) Airbrush compressors with tank/reservoir
4) Silent airbrush compressors

1) These are your hardware store air-tool compressors (example). Can be had on sale super cheap. They usually dont have a moisture trap, are LOUD AS HECK, and tend to be difficult to adjust because their operating pressure is usually well over 100psi (you can usually dial them down to AB pressures, but you'll have a hard time getting it just right). Often require convoluted adapting to airbrush hose/fittings.

2) These are fairly common, somewhat quiet, compressors (example). On sale they can be reasonably cheap. Dont even look at one if it doesn't have a regulator and moisture trap. The downside to these is the moisture trap cant do a good job because of where it is in the line. Some of these are actually sold with a length of coil cable running between the compressor and the trap (that hose acts as a sort of very very small "tank"). You will get a slight "pulsing" of the air, and the motor will kick on and off constantly as you work (in some cases every couple seconds).

3) Same as #2, but with a small tank between the compressor and the trap/regulator (example). This is what I recommend. Solves all the shortcomings of the first two and can easily be found for under $200 if you shop it. I wrote a review a while back.

4) The holy grail (example). Uses an oil-bath compressor (similar to what is in your refrigerator). DEAD silent. Only one problem: expensive as heck (start at over $500 for 0.7 CFM).

 Sunsanvil wrote:

Tikay Fortooun wrote:
If anyone has a recommendation for an adjustabke compressor, I’d be interested!

4) The holy grail (example). Uses an oil-bath compressor (similar to what is in your refrigerator). DEAD silent. Only one problem: expensive as heck (start at over $500 for 0.7 CFM).

I managed to snag a SilentAire Super Silent 20A off eBay for $320. It's the best. Lots of late night airbrush sessions in my tiny apartment.