 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video. Today we're going to be talking all about the airbrush. This video is really a complete guide to the airbrush. I'm going to break down everything about it, the different ways to use it and how you can best put that airbrush to work for you. Now as a point of fact, this is a big giant dragon and this is an airbrush. And to facilitate teaching all about this, we're going to go ahead and paint this. So, how do we turn this into this? And the answer is, well, with a lot of airbrush work and also a lot of brush work too. So come along with me on this journey as I break down the airbrush from top to bottom and paint a giant dragon along the way. Let's get into it. Let's strict techno-mancer that is Vinci V. Let us get into the technique and learn it Vinci V. Let's start with the basic explanation. The airbrush itself. Now, your first question might be, what airbrush do I purchase? If you're just starting out any cheap dual action gravity-fed airbrush is going to work. Dual action means when I push down on the trigger it makes air flow. When I pull back, it makes air flow out the front. Down and back, dual action. Gravity-fed means the cup is on top. You don't want one of the ones where you have to screw in a little bottle. Those just don't allow you to change paint enough. They don't really facilitate model work. So, any gravity-fed dual action airbrush is fine. I personally started myself with a simple Master Series G22. It's cheap. It's easy. From there, you can certainly go to something like an Iwata Neo or an Eclipse. Or if you really feel like an investment this has been my workhorse airbrush for seven years. This is the Iwata HPCS. There's lots of great airbrushes on the market. My best advice to you is don't buy something very nice to start. That is no good. When you first get your airbrush you will mess stuff up and you will get clogged. You will ruin it. Much like your first car, your first airbrush should not be an expensive thing. Alright, let's talk about the airbrush itself. So, the airbrush consists of several parts. I've already mentioned the trigger which has dual action both down and back. We've mentioned the gravity feed cup where you're generally going to put your paint. Don't mind that my airbrush is a dirty mess. That doesn't really matter. The other important parts of your airbrush are your nozzle cap. Some nozzle caps are fully round like this meaning you can push your finger on the top and then pull back to mix your paint. If they don't have that sort of thing, if they have open areas you either have to cover it completely with something like a rubber glove or a sponge, something soft, or you simply have to mix your paint before you put it in the cup. Now a note about the needle inside the airbrush. As I mentioned, your needles will have various sizes, 0.3, 0.2, 0.4 basically equating to the size of the hole at the end. The needle itself is the most sensitive part of your airbrush. This needs to be treated very carefully, very precisely and always make sure it's treated extremely gingerly. If this tiny little tip down here bends, well, there's not much of a way to fix it. There are needle fixing tools. They work to varying degrees. You can also take the needle and try to roll it flat with a cup, like a glass cup. You can set it down and try to roll it back flat. That's sort of an old school trick. But for the most part, if you bend your needle, especially if you really bend it bad, it means it's new needle time. The other important part that I want to show you here is up front. And that is your actual nozzle, which for most airbrushes is something that looks like this. It's going to be made of brass or something similar, and it's going to have a little area here on the front. Now this nozzle is what will cause you to screw up your airbrush more than anything else because the paint is flowing down to 0.3 millimeters wide right here. What that means is that there's not very much space in there for if any paint gets in and dries, you're done for. There are special needle cleaning tools you can get. They look basically like your needle itself. It's a very sharp tool. I'll link one down in the description so you can see it. And you have to have a little wrench to pull this off. If you're having issues where your paint is spattering or backing up into the cup, it usually means the nozzle. It means that primer or paint or something has dried in here, and even though it paint is partially flowing and you might be able to put the needle through, it's dried right around the edge there. If that's the case, you need to get your little needle scraper tool, that little sharp needle. You need to soak some water or alcohol or soap or all of the above inside this nozzle and scrape it out. If when you pull back on the trigger, you get air flow back in your bubbles. That usually means there's not an airtight seal. So either the tip itself isn't attached enough. The nozzle isn't airtight with your something's not airtight and the air isn't only being pushed out the front, but it's also backflowing into the cup itself. So as I said, the basic way the airbrush works is thinned paint goes in the cup and then you push down on the airbrush trigger slightly and then pull back. And remember that is two separate actions. One of the things I often see new people do is they jam the trigger all the way down and then wrench it all the way back, which makes paint spray out. The spray pattern that comes out of the front of the airbrush is a cone, which means that you can use it directionally as we'll see later. The less you push down and the less you pull back, the less wide the cone, the less the amount of paint, the less the air pressure that comes out of the airbrush. Working on that trigger control is going to be something very important as you begin your airbrushing journey in the same way that brush control is really important when you start working with a normal brush. So you've got your airbrush and now it's time to get working. Primer is just that, it's primer. And if you want to learn all about primers, it's linked up in the top where I cover primer in a recent video. We're actually going to start this at the base coat stage. I'm working here over the model completely in opaque black because this time I'm going to build the colors up and lay different colors in different places. One of the important things you need to do when you're airbrushing is work thin, thinner than you think. I see a lot of people when they start out really make their airbrush paint quite thick. Now, how do you thin your paint? Well, I use an 80-20 mix of Vallejo airbrush thinner and Vallejo flow improver. Put those two into a bottle, 80-20, and then I mix that into my paint. A general good rule for most paints, most paint that you're gonna spray through your airbrush is at minimum one to one thinner to paint. And in fact, if you're using very thick paints, Proacryl Chimera, something like that, you want to generally do it two to one, two thinner to every one drop of paint. Why do you want to work thin? One, it makes your airbrush much less prone to clogging. Two, the airbrush is a very fast tool. It allows you to apply paint easily, efficiently, and quickly. You can do with an airbrush in seconds what it would take minutes or even hours to do with a regular brush. So let's use that to our advantage and work thin and build those colors up slowly. Remember, acrylic paint is translucent and out of the airbrush, it becomes such a fine mist that a lot of the color underneath is gonna show. We can use that to our advantage. Building up base coat layers by slowly applying thin airbrush layers over and over again. At the same time, as I said earlier, you want to use that dual action. Don't always just wrench the airbrush all the way down and all the way back. That trigger and that trigger control allows you to also control the layer thickness. So if you're just minimally pushing down and minimally pulling back, you're going to get thin, easily controllable layers of paint on the miniature. Next up, direction really matters. The direction you're pointing your airbrush down, up at the side versus how the model is arranged is going to matter. Because remember, the paint is coming out at the front of your airbrush like a cone. Again, we can use that to our advantage. If you hold the miniature at a certain angle and spray directly down, the parts not exposed to the spray won't get paint on them. This seems really obvious, I suppose, but it's a great technique, something you can really easily control to create directional lighting, to create particular highlights wherever your light source happens to be. Use the angle, the cone, that the airbrush is spraying combined with the way and the direction you're holding your miniature to achieve effects and put paint where you need it. For example, if you're trying to create shadows or highlights, then make sure that the miniature is tilted in the correct direction where you're only applying those particular colors to the areas that need them. Do be aware, though, overspray is a thing. And you might have the cloak in exactly the angle you want, but if the arm is often back to the side, you could be accidentally hitting the arm as well. So always watch the full spray pattern of where your airbrush is going to go. Your airbrush can do a lot more, of course, than just base coat. The other thing that your airbrush can do incredibly well is glaze. Glazing with your airbrush is so much easier than glazing with a brush. In this case, you're going to thin your paint a lot more. You're going to thin your paint down something like 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 drops of thinner to one drop of paint, depending on how thick that paint is. When you do this, you're then going to want to make sure that trigger control is much more precise because the paint will be very liquid. Pull back too hard. If you put too much air, too much paint out, or if you hold the airbrush too close to the miniature, you're going to get spider webbing where you get the liquid kind of spreading everywhere under the air pressure. This happens to everyone when you first try. It's just a matter of practice. Once you master that exact amount of air pressure in the distance, which is generally in sort of the 4 to 6 inches range. Maybe you can work a little closer, 3 inches if you're working detail, 2 inches, something like that. You're going to operate that sort of 2 to 6 inches depending on how precise your trigger control is and exactly what you're trying to achieve. Eventually, you can get a lot closer to the miniature. You might work less than one inch away from the miniature if you have really precise trigger control. Keep in mind, because it's a cone, the closer you are to the miniature, the less of that cone is spreading out. The farther you back away from the nozzle of the airbrush, the more paint is going to spray over the entire volume of the miniature. But glazing allows you to control colors in a really, really easy way. If you have struggles with achieving smooth blends, glazing through your airbrush could be exactly the way you achieve it. You could do more of those than just glaze if you thin your paint way down. So now we're up in the range of 7, 8, 9, 10 drops thinner to one drop of paint. So we're talking extremely thin. Then you can do what we call tinting or filtering the underlying layers. Here you can make slight color shifts on the paint to increase the contrast and also influence the hues that are on display. Create more visual confusion, depth and complexity for the eye. It's a really powerful tool with your airbrush. If you've ever seen makeup tutorials or something like that where they add these very slight colors to the face, this is one of the ways you can achieve that easily on your miniature. Now, a quick note. The airbrush obliterates shadows. Generally, if the miniature doesn't have extremely hard angles if there's recesses, panel lines, things like that, those are going to get blasted away even if you're operating in a directional fashion because those creases, those crevices, those panel lines are still pointed up. And so when you spray the airbrush, it's going to turn those the same bright color, the same color in general as whatever the other area around it is. So in the case of this dragon, that presuppose a challenge because he has a bunch of scales. Here's where I started to use things like an oil wash or things like that to re-instantiate those darker colors. I'll go back in with brushwork to bring out the scales later. Oil washes are a powerful tool in combination with the airbrush because I can apply them and then wipe them away. You can do much the same thing with streaking grind, by the way. But enamel and oil washes because they're much more controllable than acrylic washes are really a great pair. They're the sort of potatoes to the stake of the airbrush because I don't leave any residue on the upper areas that I've carefully coated with the airbrush like I would with an acrylic wash that I can't clean. The other thing you can do with the airbrush is rebuild your environmental shadows. Sometimes because of the nature of angles, you don't get shadows exactly where you would want them. Using a careful glaze of a dark color can rebuild that shadow into place in a very careful way. This is what you can see me doing here with the muscle structure where because of the sort of angle of them, I wasn't able to be as precise but rather than try to glaze all that in with a brush which might be time consuming, let's just get out the airbrush, let's work very, very, very thin and let's just go ahead and rebuild those shadows. Now, I've talked a lot about putting paint through your airbrush but of course ink is also a very powerful tool through your airbrush because inks use a liquid medium there and are quite naturally transparent. They're the perfect tool for the airbrush. When you want to work thin with things like glazes or filtering or tinting, inks can be a great way to do it. They are very simple, easy to mix, almost impossible to clog your airbrush with so it's a much smoother experience both in cleaning and in application but also because they're transparent they show a lot naturally of the colors underneath. When you're changing paints, one of the things you'll all often do is not bother to clean the airbrush in between and this I think seems like heresy but instead I'll slowly mix paint up in the cup. I'll start with my initial color and then I'll add additional drops of color either going lighter or darker you can only go one direction really and work that highlight up slowly. Again, it's a good way to build layers with the airbrush without actually having to expend too much effort. You can have very subtle gradual transitions simply because you're always adding a few more drops of lighter color paint into an already existing mix. Making you assured you're getting a nice gradual step up the progression into a highlight or down into a shadow. The final thing I'll say with your airbrush is that the culmination of all this is that it allows you to bring extreme deltas together. What that means is that when you're working with the airbrush especially to use it as a glaze or a technique to bring colors together you want to work much more extreme in your underlying techniques. Oftentimes what I'll do is I'll dry brush very extreme color transitions over especially models like this that are scaled and then use the airbrush to simply snap all those colors together. So when you're highlighting maybe it's with a dry brush maybe it's with a normal brush you're applying some very careful highlights you can then use the airbrush and a thin glaze like an ink or something like that or even a normal paint to then bring it all back together. The extra layer even though it's transparent or translucent as in where I suppose will hide the sins of those separations between the different colors and it'll make it look as though you have an ultra smooth blend hiding underneath. So there you go that's everything I did here with the airbrush now this big dragon still required a lot of brushwork I'm going to show you some photos of how he came out in the end but of course a lot of what I did here really use the airbrush as a critical part of my workflow. Now the airbrush much like of the recent dry brushing video I did with Ninjon linked up top if you want to reference that is simply one more tool in your toolbox it's not meant to be the only thing you use you don't always get the screwdriver out sometimes you need other tools sometimes very specialized tools the airbrush is quite generally useful it's multi-purpose it can do a lot of different things as you saw here whether it be from base coats glazes making color transitions filtering or bringing extreme deltas together there's a lot you can do with the airbrush but it has to be combined with other things like you saw me use the dry brush here oil washes and even normal brush layer painting instead it should be one part of a harmonious set of tools you're using to achieve an overall strong effect now the one thing I didn't really talk about in this video was cleaning your airbrush and that is a really important part fortunately I have a separate video on cleaning your airbrush that's linked up top right now I do recommend you go watch that video one additional note if you get some clogs or something like that in your airbrush and you can't get it clean with just water as you see in that video a little isopropyl alcohol 91%, 99% isopropyl alcohol put it in there let it soak and then use your normal brush cleaning tools that isopropyl alcohol does a great job of cleaning everything outside and melting away acrylic paint so there you go that's the finished dragon and that's everything about the airbrush I hope this was really useful to you as a guide if you've got questions I didn't answer drop those down in the comments I'm always happy to help give this a like if you liked it subscribe for additional hobby cheating we have new videos here every Saturday but as always I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time Happy airbrushing