How To Airbrush | Complete Beginners Guide

[Music] hey guys fletcher here i'm the studio artist for tabletop tactics and today's video is all about airbrushing we've been getting in a load of requests for an airbrushing video so i've put together a tutorial that'll be perfect to teach the basics not only to beginners but airbrush aficionados i hope you find this helpful guys now are you ready it's time for the war paint [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so guys to make this video as easy to understand as possible i'm going to break it down into three sections so first i'm going to talk about the equipment i use so we're going to go over the compressor we're going to go over the airbrush i'm going to dismantle it on camera and explain how it works all the parts that are involved with it and then i'm going to talk about some accessories so cleaners thinners stuff like this cleaning pot for the next section i'm going to actually use the airbrush on camera and show how it works we're going to go over some basics um on how i use it on a day-to-day basis for the final section i'm going to talk about cleaning and maintaining your airbrush a really important part to avoid clogging and give it a nice long life so with all that being said let's go into the first section of the equipment starting with the compressor what is a compressor and why do we need it when airbrushing to put it simply a compressor generates and maintains air pressure this air pressure can be controlled so be sent out of the compressor via the air hose and into the airbrush and then we can manipulate the pressure to expel paint this is a single piston compressor with a tank and a regulator now you'll see compressors being sold with just this section of it without the tank but i like the tank because it has a more consistent airflow and is quieter what i mean by this when you set the pressure psi the tank will pressurize and then turn off and then you can use the airbrush quietly and so it needs to switch on again to maintain the psi if you didn't have the tank this compressor would constantly be on it would be constantly making noise and it would also wear out a lot faster so when buying an airbrush compressor recommend getting one with a tank this is the regulator so it allows you to set the psi the pressure with this valve i tend to use between 15 to 35 psi and later on in the video i'll show you where to use certain pressure and where it is appropriate this part of the regulator is the water trap so a side effect of using the compressor is that water vapor will generate and this just catches it in here and you can clean it out regularly by just pressing down holding a cup underneath it this is a as series compressor so a lot of manufacturers produce this kind of compressor and they all look quite similar but when you're looking for a compressor just type in as airbrush compressor and choose something that looks similar to this so having the single piston compressor the air tank and the regulator so with that being said let's move on to talking about the airbrush so guys we're going to talk about the airbrush itself now i've been using this airbrush the eyewater eclipse hpcs for three to four years from the beginning of painting using an airbrush really i did pick up a cheap airbrush before this one actually it was about 40 quid off of ebay if i remember correctly and that was just to basically practice airbrushing and cleaning before upgrading to a high-end one just i just so i know that i'd ruin a cheap one instead of this one if things went wrong but that's something i'd recommend to brand new beginners of airbrushing is you pick up a cheap one first to just learn the basics with and practice with before buying a high-end one to use properly and maintain and keep nice but yeah this is the always eclipse and it is a gravity-fed dual action airbrush um it's important to get a dual action one and what it means is basically it can control the air pressure and the amount of paint that goes through it so with the trigger you control the air pressure coming out of the compressor and into the airbrush by pushing it down and by putting it back this controls the amount of paint that's let through into this airstream which comes out at the end of the airbrush so this means we can be precise with the airbrush and use it in multiple ways so if i wanted to prime or base coat a model for example i'd let through the max amount of air pressure and i put it pull it back a lot so letting more paint through into the stream so i could do long bursts with it and get a lot of coverage quickly for like priming base coating on the other end of the scale if i wanted to get in close and do some fine detail work like doing a glow effect or something i'd be gentle with the air pressure pressing down on it and i pull it back slightly letting less paint through so i can be really precise and getting close with the airbrush i'm going to talk about a bit of the main components now i'll dismantle the airbrush later on when i'm talking about cleaning maintaining it but i'll just run through the key components you need to know about the airbrush so starting with the needle this is a .35 needle with the airbrush you want to aim between a point three and a point five needle as this will get you covered for what you need in mini painting really and the needle basically controls how fine the spray is this is a 0.35 needle and it comes with this iwata eclipse the trigger as mentioned controls the airflow and the amount of paint going into the airflow this is the cup this is where you put your thinner and paint the cap on the end of the airbrush is what protects the needle from damage you don't want the needle to be the end of the needle to be like chipped or anything as this will really mess up the airbrush so this is this is what a cap is for to protect it and also from stabbing yourself as well finally one of the key components is the nozzle and this is what the needle goes into so the paint goes along the needle through the nozzle and out the airbrush blockages and stuff are most likely to happen in the nozzle so this is a really important part to make sure it's unclogged and clean and i'll go through that later so that was the airbrush now let's talk a bit about the accessories that you need alongside it let's talk about the essential accessories you're going to need when you start airbrushing the first thing is the airbrush hose this is a standard airbrush hose with a 1 8 fitting here and a one quarter fitting here when you're looking to buy a compressor or an airbrush online the hose will often come in a bundle so that's something you can consider next you're going to need airbrush thinner so if you're used to your standard paints that you use with a paintbrush they'll be way too thick to go through the airbrush it will just clog it up and so this is where the thinner comes in this will thin it down and make it diluted and it will flow really nicely out of the end this is like your standard paints that you use like your citadel base or layer colors really there are paints that are designed to go through the airbrush they're airbrushed ready paints and they are pretty thin they're really useful but for me i just use standard paints and thin it down with thinner i used the vallejo airbrush thinner been using it all this time and it's really good does the job so i'd recommend this so the next is airbrush cleaner by valejo as well when you're done with the color in the airbrush obviously some residue is going to be left in the cup so we clean it out with this and this does a great job of cleaning out the inside of the airbrush from the cup down the nozzle and something to use after a session just to leave it in there ready for the next one when you're changing colors in your airbrushing session you need to put obviously the dirty paint water after a color somewhere so i'd recommend just choosing an old cup you don't care about and what you can do is just dump it in there this fills up faster than you think so make sure it's a nice big one but yeah i tend to empty this out once a week down the loo does the job just like that a really useful thing to have on airbrushing is a spray gun and this just speeds up the changing of paint and cleaning so i just use it to blast out the color before putting in some cleaner for example and this gets rid of most of the dirty paint water i just spray it and dump it straight into my cup this is really cheap to pick up just a spray bottle you can get a fever amazon and it's something i definitely recommend lastly you want a cleaning pot so the first function of this it's a great spot to actually rest the airbrush stops it from going anywhere you don't want to leave it on the side on the tail we want to shoot with a bit of care and you can spray out any excess paint down into the pot which is what it's designed for really it's got this filter here where the vapor comes out of and when the pot fills up you can also just dump this down the loo no problem at all so these are the accessories that you need right at the start of airbrushing and i hope you found that useful let's move on to actually using the airbrush and putting it into practice so let's start actually using the airbrush in this section i'm going to talk about how to set the psi the pressure on the compressor how to appropriately thin out your paint ready for airbrushing how to use the trigger basic trigger control and then finally i'll talk about how to clean out the airbrush cup when you don't know the color and get it ready for the next one the very first thing we're going to start with is turning on the compressor and setting the pressure so after i hit the switch and turn it on it's going to make a bit of noise as it pressurizes and i'll turn this knob clockwise to set the pressure to 30 psi this is a this is basically the pressure i use all the time airbrushing and it's a great one to start with so what i'll do now is hit on the on switch and that sound as i said is the tank pressurizing so i'll turn the regulator clockwise until i hit 30 psi now that that pressure is on 30 psi it's coming down the air hose and into the airbrush as you can see i'm controlling it with this trigger so now that my pressure is set on the compressor i'm going to talk a bit about how to thin out your standard acrylic paint that you're used to so in this case i'm using citadel base and red if i put this straight into the airbrush and tried to use it it likely wouldn't come out at all it'll just clog it up and be all nasty so the first thing we need to do is put in airbrush thinner so that's what i'm going to do right now i'm just going to put a couple of drops of thinner in and a couple of dollops of piston red as i'm only going to be airbrushing a small section of this model just for demonstration purposes a good starting point is you want to always put this in first before the paint so i put a few drops in and as i'm adding the paint i'm looking at it and i want to aim for a milky type of consistency i can't really give exact ratios as it's something you have to really learn by feel and it also paint properties differ across colors and brands so it's something you have to kind of learn for yourself when using multitudes of different paints and stuff like that so this is a milky kind of consistency in the cup that'll be good for base coating if i put too much thinner into the cup it'll be very thin and this can cause problems like firstly the coverage will be bad over the model so you'd have to do lots of coats to get an opaque color and also a thing called spider webbing can occur now this happens when the pressure is too much for the thin paint the air pressure will force the paint to kind of spiderweb out and to combat this what we need to do is just add more paint to get to that milky consistency again alternatively you can turn down the pressure on the compressor to a lower psi but for now let's just aim for that milky kind of consistency on the other end of the spectrum where the paint is too thick this can potentially cause clogging in the airbrush which is what we don't want and also can cause speckling on the model similar to like a primer the little dots you get with a bad prime job this can happen if the paint's too thick and to avoid that all we need to simply do is to add more thinner but for now this is a good kind of consistency i've got on the cup and i'll use it to go on this crisis suit that i have prepared for this video before applying it to the crisis suit what i'll do is just test it on my hand or a surface ball and make sure the paint is coming out how i want it to so as you can see it's flowing really nicely out of the airbrush and it's giving me really good coverage and it's not speckly and it's not spider webbing when applying it to the model i'm just going to do this as a base coat and i'll explain what i'm doing after i've showed you on camera if you just pay attention to what i'm doing with my trigger finger that will be useful for you to kind of learn this technique of base coating or priming [Music] so that's the start of a base coat i'm doing on the model what i'm doing with this is pushing the trigger all the way down to let the max air pressure through the airbrush and i'm pulling it back generously to allow lots of paint to go into the airflow to come out onto the model i'm holding it about four to six inches away and doing kind of controlled bursts to get a nice coverage of colour up on the model to get an opaque colour you need to do multiple coats of this as airbrush paint is spinned out and it's less opaque than just applying with a brush what you can do to speed up the process is use the air pressure to dry out the paint on the model so i'm just going to press down on the trigger and not pull it back and what this will do is just send air pressure out that nozzle and this will just help dry the paint out and then once i can see it's dry i'll repeat the process and get a nice coverage as you can see there that red has built up really nice as a base coat now if i wanted to do like a glow effect for example like make this a little nodule glow on him and i'll just use the red for now just to save time not going to change to different color but to do this i'm going to get in really really close with the airbrush and i'll show you how i'm doing it and explain a bit afterwards like before so as you can see i've really achieved a smaller area with the airbrush and how i've done this is you have to get in really close to the airbrush set the air pressure and i'm going to really pull it back gently to release minimal amount of paint in and that way we can be really precise and i'm kind of toggling it so it doesn't overload the area full of paint and by doing this i can get a really nice concentrated area of paint on the model as you can see so they were two basics of trigger control i've shown you so doing a base coat with concentrated short bursts getting close and doing glow effects by maintaining an air pressure and toggling the trigger really gently to build up the color so next i'm going to show you what happens if the airbrush clogs up um and how we can resolve that so that's coming up next so guys what happens if you're happily airbrushing and it starts to clog up there are a few ways to deal with this what i like to do is firstly if the paint's not coming out as you can see i'll violently pull back on the trigger and this will kind of force it to come through like so another option you can do as kind of a last resort on this airbrush the eyewater eclipse is to undo this nut here and i'm what i'm going to do as i press down the trigger is push this needle back and forward quite gently make sure not to damage it but this will push the paint through as well kind of force it through and get rid of the clog let's just show on camera as you can see this forces the paint out and if the clog doesn't go away what you have to do unfortunately is to strip down the whole airbrush and clean it out give it a deep clean and do it properly but those are just a couple of tips to unclog your airbrush on the go as a final thing guys what i want to mention is if you're experiencing any bubbling inside the cup as you're airbrushing and think it's clogging what you need to do is make sure this cap here is screwed on really tight tight as you can and also make sure the needle is all the way down and nice and secure and this way the bubbling should stop and we can airbrush normally as you can see if the bubbling still occurs then like i said before you need to deep clean the airbrush and this is what i'll talk about in the next section the final part of this video is how to deep clean your airbrush so i'm going to run you through all the stuff you need and then we'll start the process so the first thing you're going to need is lots and lots of kitchen roll as it gets very messy and you need to dry off the airbrush and also protect your work surface from all of the the water and cleaning we're going to be using we're going to need some water so i've got my spray gun here we're going to need some airbrush cleaner i've got some lubricating gun oil here oh this stuff is really good to make sure the moving parts are working smoothly and efficiently and so they don't really stick that's why i like to use the gun oil i'm going to use a cup of some kind i'm using a rattle can lid to place all of the parts of the airbrush inside to soak i'm gonna need a toothbrush to scrub the airbrush body and the parts inside and also some of these little pipe cleaner things and these usually come along with the cleaning pot when you order it so the first thing to do when deep cleaning is to prepare your cup with some cleaning solution um for the parts of the airbrush to be soaked in so i'm gonna fill it half with cleaner [Music] and because i don't want to waste too much cleaner i'm also going to fill it with a bit of water this will be just fine and we want to get enough so most of the parts of the airbrush will fit into it so it's just a little solution there like that i'm just gonna leave it right there so now i'm just going to break down my airbrush so i'm going to dismantle all of it starting with this cap so there's different sections of the cap and what i'll do once to take them off is just pop them in to the cup [Music] so this is the remainder of the cap i'll do the nozzle let's get the uh let's get the needle out first obviously the needle can't fit in there just leave it to the side for now but yeah the nozzle's gonna go in there the chuck at the end and then this section that covers the spring this screws off so we'll put this in the spring itself that let's that controls the trigger this section here i'm going to pull the trigger out and then that is the airbrush fully dismantled so whilst these are soaking in my solution what i'll do is just clean out the body now for you guys on camera so we'll start with the toothbrush and what i can do is just dip it in to my cleaning solution there in my pot and i'll just start to scrub the inside of the airbrush cup on this airbrush i haven't been too caring of it some paint has built up over time but this doesn't matter too much as long as it's nice and clean down on the inside it'll be just fine so what i'll do is that i'll run it inside the cup and then once i'm happy with that i will take my pipe cleaner to fit it through the front now this is a this is the biggest one it's an appropriate size so what i'll do is just dip that in my cleaning solution and then use it to clean out this airbrush i'll just move down to the next one so actually go all the way up into the cup as you can see there i'll also run it along the back here like this down the inside and down this section here so that's basically the body done and i'll just leave to dry on my kitchen roll as you can see there's been a bit of paint texture built up on this needle so to clean that it's pretty simple just get my cleaner and i'll run it across it and then i'll just use my kitchen roll just always pull backwards don't pull towards the needle because we don't want to damage the end there and this will just clean off all the paint nicely so that's the needle done now after that i'll work through each section of the airbrush bit by bit so we'll start with this cover here so let's get my pipe cleaner run it through leave that to dry this is the trigger here so what i'll do this is select a smaller size and go for the little gap and for bits to have moving parts like this i like to get my gun oil and just shove it on that part and lubricate it and this will make sure it's nice and loose and not stiff stuck or anything like that so the next section this is the bit that pushes down on the trigger with the spring over it so this is quite small here as you can see so i need a really really thin bit of my uh my pipe clean now and what i'll do is just shove that in through there clean it just like that i'll go both ends again it's got a moving part here so i'll stick my gun over on it get that soak in it's like a it's like a different mix isn't it you don't what you're gonna get but yeah uh this is the this is the cap here i pulled out so i'm just rubbing off the paint i can see on the end of my thumb and we'll go down with the cleaner here make sure you rub it across all the sides and make sure it's all missed out paint and just rinse it off in there and that's done the spring so basically you can see what i'm doing guys i'm just using my toothbrush for my spring um sorry my toothbrush my pipe cleaner to just clean off basically everything with this solution make sure it's all nice and shiny i don't really need to worry about this um this nut at the end we can just leave that as is and same with this cap it's got a little bit of red there so this goes on the ends the red's built up as you can see so i'll just use my toothbrush to get the worst of this off and you can kind of see without why we need the kitchen roll it's a really messy process but it's definitely something you need to do fairly regularly um in order to keep good care of your airbrush now the last bit we need to clean it properly is the nozzle this might be a bit controversial but the way i clean it i actually use the needle but you have to be extremely careful of how you do this because you don't want to damage the tip your airbrush your cleaning kits that stuff comes like this it will come with this kind of cleaning tool like a needle like this like cuts off here and i suggest you use that instead but for this purpose and what i do in day to day is just use the needle so what i'll do is i'll insert it in really carefully into the nozzle and i'll run some cleaner down it and then what i'll do really really carefully guys is i'll start using the edge of the needle to push out paint from around the inside so i'll just work my way 360 degrees around the nozzle and you can see there that there's starting there's paint starting to come off of this needle so really gently i'll do this until there is no paint coming out of it what you can also do if you're still not happy is stick some of your gun oil down the nozzle now this uh this is really effective against like paint build up as you can see here so that will really get out all the paint so there's that mephiston red that we were using previously and that's come out just like that most blockages as mentioned happen in this section of the airbrush the nozzle so it's really important that it is clean when you're doing a project like that just give it a little rinse like that so yeah that is the airbrush all clean now so what i'll do is assemble it again and i recommend you disassemble it and assemble it until you're really comfortable with all the pieces like i've done this so many times now because i've been using the airbrush for years but i'll just show you on camera in what order to do it so we start with the trigger and this little bit here at the end this is a bit a bit fluffy so make sure it's going right down into this hole of the airbrush here like so and make sure it fits in really nice it might take me a few attempts on camera but yeah that's it that's in there no it's not we'll try again so you kind of just got to angle it until it fits really snugly into the airbrush and if you if you do get this particular airbrush you'll see where this end needs to fit down into it it is a bit fiddly to do just gonna do it off camera guys for the purposes of the demonstration now that the trigger is down in there you can tell if it springs back up like this [Music] so now that triggers in there we're going to move on to this section of it so make sure it's this way around with the moving part going in and we'll just slot it down the tube until it hits the trigger that tip there you can see we'll just leave that like that then the spring goes on and then this casing goes on after the spring and it'll fit just inside it and then you screw it clockwise like that so that's the most tricky part of assembling the airbrush next i'll start with this end so the nozzle goes on first followed by the cap make sure you screw it on really tight and followed by the secondary cap here if you don't drop it lastly we'll put the needle down really gently and now after you've cleaned it it will go nice and smooth down and until and it will just stop you can feel it and don't push it anymore after that and then we use the nut finally to tighten and secure that needle in place and then that is the airbrush all cleaned as a final test to make sure it's clean i'll hook it up to the compressor again i'll just run through a bit of cleaner a bit my airbrush cleaner just run it through just push it through a little bit so i'm going to turn the compressor on and then i'll just leave a bit of cleaner in the cup until it's ready for the next project and what i'll do is when i start again i'll remove the cleaner and then put in the thinner and paint as normal so yeah that is how you deep clean your airbrush guys and it will be ready to go at a moment's notice all nice and operational and that is the end of this section so guys that concludes the airbrushing video how to start with airbrushing and the basics so what we went through is learning about the different components of the airbrushing so like the compressor the airbrush itself all the accessories you need with it how to use it so setting the pressure diluting paint thinning out the paint trigger control and also cleaning out the airbrush at the end i really hope you found this information useful if you have any questions at all just please let me know in the comments and i'll be happy to answer as i know we covered a lot of stuff in this video but yeah that'll do it for today and i'll see you back with another painting tutorial soon cheers [Music] you

Channel: Tabletop Tactics

Views: 108,423

Keywords: warhammer, warhammer 40k, games workshop, warhammer tv, wh40k, batrep, battle report, warhammer 40000, 40k, list analysis, Tactica

Id: cgrf4Mahtec

Length: 30min 56sec (1856 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 27 2022