 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby-cheating video and today we're going to talk about how cleaning your airbrush is real fast and simple. Now I talk about this in some of the other videos that I do where I feature the airbrush, but I wanted to bring this out into its own video because one of the things I hear people frequently talk about in reference to using their airbrush is, well it's so much work, oh god I've got to get it out and then I've got to clean it. And it's described as though it's this sort of twelve trials of Hercules, this Sisyphean task to push a rock up a hill, when in fact I'll fly through like ten colors with this thing in the span of a few minutes. And so, but it's really all about what you're doing and how you're cleaning it. So what we're going to talk about here is basically quick changing colors and how to actually get it nice and clean, nice and fast. So here we go and let's talk about how we're going to show this off. So I've got a couple paints here, I have like a pretty thick paint, definitely not you know just out of the pot ready for airbrush, I have a, this is an air color that's more obviously thin and then we have an ink and we're going to just use all three real fast. Now here's the actual secret, let's put the airbrush aside for a moment, here's the actual secret. One, I have a little squeezy bottle, you can get little squeezy bottles everywhere, this one is from CK Studios, who I teach with and you can take classes with, you can find that link below. But so, this is a pretty easy thing, you can get them from CK directly, obviously you can get these little bottles on Amazon, anything like that. Have a little squeezy bottle, they're cheap. Then we have a little plastic cup with a little paper towel in it. I buy a big thing of these plastic cups, they come in like 200 for a couple bucks off Amazon. They're probably the cheapest, crappiest thing in the world. It really doesn't matter because we're not using them to drink out of, okay? So these are your two keys, you'll see. Alright, so we're just going to go ahead and spray on this piece of plastic card so I don't actually spray on my desk. So the first tip I'll give you is generally use more thinner than you think. So like in the case of using this very thick paint, you know I'm going to use a lot of thinner. They're probably 13, 14 drops. Always use more thinner, a little bit more than you think you need. It's just better in the end and the reason I say that is because you can always spray a second layer of paint on with your airbrush in seconds. It is very hard to take paint off, that doesn't work. You can do one, you can't do the other, okay? So put a couple drops of that in there, there we go. Alright, then we're just going to mix it around. I have an old crappy brush that I use to mix. So we just swish it around and some people like to mix outside the pot and that's fine. I'm not really, I'm just using the tips of the bristles down there in the bottom. I don't ever let the ferrule touch the needles, I'm not really worried about breaking or bending anything, but you can do whatever you like, okay? So there we go, we got mixed paint. Now we'll go ahead and in the end we'll put like maybe one more drop in just to get everything there after we mix up and do a little backfilling. Let's do a little test, oh yeah, nice and smooth, alright, great. So here we go, doo-dee-doo-doo-doo, that's very reflective, there we go, there we go, we got a little happy smiley face, I'm making kind of angry, okay, great, that's all I needed out of that color, let's say. Now we got a guy, alright, so now we still got a bunch of paint in here. The first thing I see people do wrong is they will take this and blow all this paint out. You want to know why your airbrush gets dry-tip and why it's hard to change is because you blow all this paint out of the front. Never put more paint through the front of your airbrush than you have to, period, okay? So, let's go to our paper cup, first I'm going to take and put just a little bit of water on that paper towel just so it stays down there. I'm going to take my squeezy bottle, boo-boo-boo-boo, I'm going to fill it all up, okay? Backfill it out, dump, fill it up again, backfill, dump, then with just that little bit of water left, I blow it against the paper towel, clean, nothing left, alright, that's it. Done, I just changed the paint. Let's keep going. So, this time, since I've got an air paint, I'll use like, maybe six drops of thinner. It's already very thin, so hence I don't have to thin it as much. It's usually a darker color that's going to show up on camera rather than orange. There you go. I didn't think about how that orange would show up over white, it's just going to turn basically yellow. We'll use some rust instead. So now I just put three drops of paint into that six drops of thinner, so when there's an air paint, it'll be around a, you know, kind of two-ish to one ratio, something like that. Once again, we give a quick mix, backfill a little, give a test. They're good. Okay. Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo. Airbrushing is fun. I'll give them a little mohar. So I've now used all that color. Dump it out. Sometimes I wear a glove so I can like, wipe around the top. Sometimes you get little bits of dry paint hanging out around the top of of the cup kind of above the water level, depending on how long you're spraying. You just take your finger, you make sure you wipe that up and out. Don't ever let chunks of paint fall in there. So you notice the only thing I ever put through the tip is this extremely thin mix of like just water and a little bit of cleaner at the very end of this whole process. You don't need one of those little spray thingies. I still have one. You do not need this. This doesn't do anything. You don't need any fancy cleaners. This is water with, this is about 20 to one water to cleaner, okay? So like, and by cleaner I just mean like some kind of surfic tent or soap or something like that, Windex, anything. Because when you're working like this, nothing is going through the tip except the little bit of spray I'm actually doing, okay? So one more time. Now let's work to an ink. So inks are very strong. So let's, here we've got some white ink, put two drops of that in. So that was maybe eight drops thinner. These are all kind of my standard ratios I tend to work in. It varies some on the paint or what I'm trying to achieve, but gives you a good idea. Also make sure you don't backfill over your something you're working on in case that's not obvious. We do a little test. Looks great. Okay. As you can see, I'm quite the artist. I think that's obvious. I'm in some amount of skill here. I'll be, I'll be contacting many art colleges later to teach this instructional course on, on airbrush painting. Look for that coming soon near you. So then we just spray or put the, filled it up with water. Now we can backfill. Now you got it. There's, I want to show you one other option. If you don't want to just turn and dump, you can also take a little pipette and you can just go whoop. And that can help you make sure you get all that little pieces down in the bottom. Really up to you. It doesn't matter too much. You'll get a little more collection of fluid down at the bottom. If you, if you just turn and dump, then you will with the pipette. So oftentimes it will depend on, if I'm, if I'm working in anything that's ends up being a little thicker, I'll usually use the pipette just to make sure I get any kind of matter up out of there. Cause the nightmare scenario and what's going to cause your airbrush to clog, by the way, clean. There you go. I just flew through three paints, right? Takes what? 20, 30 seconds in between. And I've taught for eight, nine hours straight, just only cleaning my airbrush in the way you see it doing here. Teaching an airbrushed focus class where I am airbrushing for eight hours straight and I never had a clog. Because when you are cleaning in this method, you're not putting anything through here except the most minimal amount of thinned paint necessary, okay? What I will do then is at the end of the day, or maybe every, you know, maybe twice a day, every couple hours, I'll pull out the needle. I'll make sure there's no stuck paint to it and I just kind of wipe it down carefully. Make sure there's absolutely nothing on there. We're good. It was clean, right? There was nothing stuck to there at all, but it's still good to look. Slide it back in nice and careful, re-tighten the nut, put the back back on. Good to go. And then it goes back on the shelf. I never have problems with my airbrush being clogged when I thought it was clean because that's the last step. As you slide the needle out, you just wipe it down once a day when you're all done. Between cleaning in this method, and I just leave this, by the way, sitting in my airbrush booth until it gets kind of, you know, medium-ish full. And then I just take it and dump it and get a new piece of paper towel. You need one cup. That's it. So really, I cannot recommend this method enough. I see so many people using this tool wrong in how they, in how they clean their airbrush because I'll watch them work and they'll fill this whole thing up with paint. Number one, never put more paint in here than you need to do your work. Number two, I'll see them then use like whatever amount of paint they want, and then they'll start just going and just spray the rest out at full bore. If there was ever, you might as well just say, hey, could I please get a clog here and some dry tip? I really feel like giving myself a horrible time. The key is when you're working like this, where you're not going full bore on the trigger, okay? The difference is it's much more controlled in how much air to paint ratio. So you have a much lower chance of getting dry tip. Now, some paints can make this worse. White paint will tend to cause dry tip more easily because it's an easier drying paint. That's why I only use white ink and I never use white paint through here, but so there are other little things. But the key is then we get a lot of water in there. We backfill and we dump and we put water in again and we backfill and we dump and then we blow out the last little bit and maybe need to wipe the top edge. That's it. Done. Next color. True colors doing this, one, one, one, one. It turns your airbrush into a tool that you're using interchangeably with brush painting. It's not an inconvenience. It takes no more time for me to do this than it does for me to like find a paint I wanted to use, get it out, put it on the palette and mix it down and then have it ready on my brush. It is the same amount of time. Once you've made it equivalent like that, this becomes a much more vibrant and full part of your hobby rotation where you're like doing a little brush work and then you're doing some airbrush. That's how I work constantly. It's just back and forth interchangeably. The outside of my airbrush does need to be cleaned. That's real messy and gross. Look at that. There's stains everywhere. Poor airbrush. Fortunately, this doesn't have anything to do with its performance. This is just to make me feel better. Anyway, there you go. This was a quick one today, but I really hope you enjoyed this. It's such an easy method and if I could just wave a magic wand and make sure this was everybody's experience with the airbrush, people would be so much happier with this tool. I really do hope this helps. Give it a like if you liked it. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. We have new videos here every Saturday. If you have videos you'd like to see, please feel free to drop those in the comments below. I always love viewer suggestions, but as always, if you have any questions, you can also drop that down there relating to this method. But I very much appreciate you watching and we'll see you next time.