Anyone had any experience with these before? I got the whole bundle set for Christmas & I've just been trying it out the last few days. Although so far I'm not very good with it, and very inexperienced. Any tips on how to use?

Drum

practice!

Which one did you get? (Dual action etc)

Best tips are:

Keep it CLEAN. between each colour take off the end and run water through it, give the insides a quick wipe with a floss brush/brush and reassemble. After you're done give it a GOOD clean.
Learn how it goes together, you'll find you only need to disassemble certain parts to clean it,
90% of problems you will encounter will be because it's not cleaned properly

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Yes it's a double action airbrush and keeping it clean is of great importance I see. I was wondering, can you get precise areas the with an airbrush like a small bagpack or something? I tried & it just went all over the place Here's a picture below of the one I got.



Drum

I think the best way to use an airbrush with figures is in getting a base color with shading on several models at once. It works great with skeletons. With LOTR, you could get some Nazgul done very quickly.

You could hit just a backpack with it, here's how it works:
To get a very small area with the airbrush, you have to hold the brush very close to the surface. When it's really close, too much paint would hit the surface and it would run and drip, but with a double action airbrush, you control the flow of paint. The closer you get to the surface, the less paint you let through. You can add just a little color to a spot once you get the hang of it. How it would help with painting a backpack I'm not sure, but it could be done.

Not sure about using one with LotR figures except for some specific cases. I've seen amazing work from people using air brush painting on Flames of War armor, for example, and that's pretty small. But even at that scale the details being painted are fairly typical for a spray paint concept and often look better (more realistic) sprayed on than brushed on. I can’t see using an airbrush for most LotR stuff to really add anything to the realism and probably not too much to the speed (especially when you factor in the time and effort to change out paints and clean between colors).

The one exception I can think of would be some monsters (wish mine was still working when doing a Mumuk, for example) or doing large numbers of horses. If you’re painting an army of Haradrim or Rohan cavalry then hitting 10 horses at a time with a certain blend of color, then swap color for the next set. When all done with the horse pick up your brush for the saddle and details.

Where you may really love it would be for LotR terrain. An airbrush can give some great effect to terrain.

And if all that fails, start playing Flames of War too.

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Right there's some good advice there from the both of you, thanks. I shall give it another attempt . One last question though, how thin should the paint be? I tried 1 part paint and double the amount of water. That about right?

Thanks in Advance
Drum

There's no set mixture for paint. A lot of people say the consistency of milk.

It should be thin enough so it runs, but shouldn't spray on too thin.
I thin my paints with Screen Wash (blue stuff for cars). Can't remember why I do... someone told me to Or you can get proper dilutent from vallejo etc. However water is adequate enough to work

Again it's all about experimenting to find what works with your airbrush

_________________
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Contact for commissions!

The perennial question. Kinda like how much pressure you should use. Definitely the paint can be way too thin or way too thick, but inside that there's a lot of leeway based on how you want it to cover and the size of the nozzle you are using and what you're thinning it with. I like to use Airbrush Medium when I thin paints because it helps prevent drying on the needle and nozzle. Using just water, I'd experiment between 1:1 and 3:1 ratios (water:paint). 2:1 seems reasonable to me to start with.

If you haven't already done this, take some of the plastic from a blister, plastic packaging, piece of card board, or really anything you can throw away and don't care about and prime it using the same primer you use for models. Then start practicing on it. Experiment with different thickness, make mistakes, run into problems, etc. You can learn a huge amount in just one 1/2 hour session of airbrushing that you can apply to working on actual models without messing up your actual models. It's also good to practice cleaning and taking apart and re-assembling the airbrush. It might sound like a lot oft time and trouble, but airbrushing so much fun that it's never felt like that to me. I look up after a good session and realize it's four hours later.

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