When I came back to miniature painting airbrush font, there was this one thing in good and bad that everyone kept talking about that was the air brush and before I started painting miniatures again I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d ever have use for an air brush yet here I am I have so much fun using one and I just can’t imagine painting miniatures again without having that tool hey I’m a male and this is quite more miniatures you’re probably watching this video because you have a general interest in either air brushing or miniature painting throughout my time as a miniature painter I picked up quite a bunch of tips and tricks and today we’re going through some pointers on where to start using the air brush an important note a lot of the things that I talk about in this video are my experiences and my opinions, you might have a different experience, or maybe enjoy painting your miniatures in a different way and that’s totally fine master airbrush.What is most important is that you figure out what works for you and that you have a lot of fun but painting your miniatures, but we all know that I’m right today’s topics are why an air brush what you need to get started, which air brush should I buy how to use an air brush thinning your paints cleaning your air brush, there are plenty of good reasons to pick up an air brush, you can prime your miniatures in a winter’s day looking at super smooth transitions on large flat surfaces, it can speed up your painting process, and it can even help you understand how light works all of these are plenty of good reasons to pick up an air brush but it’s totally fine, if you’re just looking for a new tool to try out and make your hobby a bit more fun so what do you need to get started with an air brush the first thing is kind of selfish.Story and that is you need an air brush a compressor, you also need an air hose, you need water average cleaner need a thinner or flow, improve or need pains. Q tips, inter dental brush and some cleaning tissue or regular paper which air brush, you should buy is one of the most subjective matters, we’re going to discuss today, you will hear some incredible painters swear by that point to harder steam back air brushes and you’ll hear other equally good painters swear by the badger point three or point four nozzle needle air brush on the other side and both of those are totally fine and there are many good brands out there among the more exclusive air brushes, you have I wanna you have harder steam back, yeah some really good Mid tier ones like badger or spar Max and even some decent no name brands and all these air brushes work.But we got to figure out which one works for you.There are two things you always should look for when buying an air brush for miniature painting and these two things are constant, no matter which brand you’re looking to buy the first one is that you want your air brush to be a dual feed air brush, what this means is that you control the flow of air and the flow of paint separately, and I will talk about this functionality a bit more later and the second thing we talk about is how the paint is Fed into your air brush you want something that’s called gravity feed air brush, what this means is pretty much that you have a cop on top of your air brush and the paint is Fed by gravity down to the needle and nozzle in front of the air brush, hence, it’s called gravity feed air brush as a rule of thumb when you’re looking to buy an air brush you need to figure out if you’re just looking to buy one to prime ministers and paint a base coat or if you’re looking to buy something that gives you a bit more control that you can use for details and paint more advanced things with.Figure that out we need to talk a little bit about the nozzle needle size of the air brushes, the smaller the needle nozzle sizes, the smaller the spread of your paint will be through your air brush, so if you’re looking to paint large vehicles or prime bunch of miniatures really fast, an air brush with a little bit bigger needle is to recommend this way, you will get a large nice flow and a bigger spread of your paint with a larger needle nozzle, you will also have less clogging and you won’t have to thin your paints as much as you have to do with a smaller needle nozzle, but if you’re looking to get into the nitty gritty details and maybe paint smaller details on smaller miniature’s an air brush with a needle size of point to or if you’re feeling brave point one five is maybe the way to go, but these smaller needles and nozzles also put a bit more requirements on you as a painter because they’re a bit harder to control, so if you’re just starting out my recommendation is to get an air brush with the needle and Knot.Size of point three somewhere around up to point four and anything in between there would work fine as well, this is a good starting point for painting miniature’s the nozzle isn’t too small, um, but it also gives you good control of your pain flow and unless you’re a super strain budget I recommend you to not buy the cheapest air brush to start with, although these do work they are a bit harder to control, but if you ask me I think struggling with your tool as a first thing when learning to air brush is not a good place to start with, so my recommendation is to start with a Mid tier one so you can learn how to use it but still enjoying the process of learning and also buying the most expensive air brushes, maybe not the best idea because the different parts of the air brush are quite sensitive and it’s really easy to break stuff and you don’t want to buy an expensive air brush that’s really hard to control for a beginner.And very easy to break so meteor one like maybe the spar Max Max three or an I wanna neo is a good place to start and buying a compressor for your air Bush that’s a completely different story I won’t be going into the super technical differences between the cheapest compressors and the most expensive ones but I’m going to give you some tips and tricks that I’ve picked up you want to be able to control the pressure of your compressor, you want to be able to go from maybe ten bars up to forty bars and control the power between these you want your air brush to be less than fifty decibels and the reason for this is quite simple, because some air brushes they sound like an airplane, they’re too loud and quite frankly it will have a headache after using it for 1020 minutes, my compressor is at 47 decibels that’s a quite decent volume, the sound doesn’t shake the house, the kids don’t wake up while I’m painting it doesn’t sound like an airplane, you can also get compressors that are down to below forty decibels.And these are incredibly quiet, but they also cost a little bit more, you can also get a compressor with an air tank and this means that the compressor will fill up your tank, it will load it with air when you start it up it takes maybe thirty to sixty seconds for it to fill up then you can pay for a couple of minutes and it doesn’t make any sound until it’s almost empty and then it starts filling up again and make sounds for thirty seconds, this is different from the cheaper ones because they will make sound as soon as you press the lever on the air brush and that can be quite disturbing sometimes, but the tank it’s not something you really need unless you can afford it, the compressor that I use is probably the most common compressor on the market, it’s called A S one eighty-six and pretty much every air brush brand and every hobby store has a different version of this one, it’s one of these products that’s like a standard product and everyone just slaps their log on top of it maybe makes different shelling on it but it’s the same compressor and it works the same just by checking on Amazon you can probably find four or five different brands. It has the exact same compressor at different price depending on which logo they slapped on it, and this compressor I can totally vouch for it, um I had nothing but good experiences with mine and it doesn’t make too much noise and it has a consistent flow in Sweden, it costs about 130 dollars but in the us, you can find them for 8090 dollars somewhere around that range and I put the link to all of these products in description, the air brushed a compressor, the thinner the flow, eight etc, you can find it all in the description down below, so we touched on what to buy and what you need to use that brush, now we’re going to talk about how to use it there rush pretty much has two functions, when you press the lever down you get the air flowing and when you put the lever back you release the paint and this is the order you do things when you use the air brush you start with air and then you spray the paint and the more you pull the lever back.The more paint is released this way you can control the amount of paint on your model and as I mentioned, you always want to start and end your spraying with just air because if you stop pressing it down stop spraying the air but still release paint there will be pain, sitting in your nozzle, and this will probably dry sooner than later and cause it to clog up and the reason you want to start with juicing, just air and that paint is if you release paint first and then press down the air button, they will have paint lying in your nozzle, and when you press down the air will spray out a splatter of paint on your beautiful miniature and probably ruin your paint job, so make sure to always start and end with air, you can also control the area which your air brushes spraying the paint if you move closer you have a smaller spread of the paint and if you move back your brush you have a bigger spread of the paint, the first time we’re getting used to an air brush a good idea is to paint some circles and some light.To practice your aim, your hand eye coordination and also get a feel for the air pressure and the paint release just by doing this a couple of times on a piece of paper, you will get a good feel for how the air brush feels and how the spread is of the paint, so where do you start with air pressure, my recommendation is to start around twenty piece I or one and a half bar, but there are a couple of different factors that can cause you to have to change the pressure of air when painting closer to your subject twenty might be a bit too high causing something called spider webbing, despite a webbing can be caused because of two reasons either because you have a too high air pressure, or maybe you release a bit too much paint in one goal so you lower your air pressure and you don’t get spider webbing anymore, but you start getting something called speckling, this is because your paint isn’t thin enough, adding a few drops of water or thinner will solve this problem for you, and sometimes instead of lowering your air pressure you might have to increase it, if you’re getting speculating even though your speed.From a bit further away and your delusion when you were spraying close to the miniature was perfect, but now you’re painting a bit further away, so you might have to increase the pressure of the air again, okay, okay, um, but wait, you talked about you have to thin your paint weight thinning your paints I touched on this subject just a few seconds ago and thinning your paints might actually be one of the main keys to success, when painting miniatures, you can do this in many different ways, some people like to buy pre thin panes from Morocco or games workshop others preaching their paints and bottles and have it ready when it’s time to paint others do it in a cup when they start painting my personal favorite ways of thinning and mixing my paint says to do it in the air brush cup when I’m about to paint this way I cut out all the extra steps for me to get started when painting and if you know me I just want to have fun when I paint so.This is what works for me I do this by adding a couple of drops of thinner, or if you live in Sweden or a place with really good water, you can just add a couple drops of water into the cup of the air brush I start with the thinner or water, because you don’t want the paint to fall into the tube of the air brush because it will be a lot harder to clean it later, and then add a few drops of paint into the cup I started around with a large old brush, you don’t want to use your new expensive Rafael brush you want to use a sheep one because this might mess up your brush a bit and when I mixed it up in the cup I covered the nozzle of my air brush I moved the lever back and down to create a back flow in the cup, this mixes the pain properly in my cup and as I mentioned it cuts me a couple of extra steps when painting and I don’t have to buy hundreds of special air brush paints that I’m just using for air brushing the right mix will vary from paint to paint so you might have to try for yourself and experiment a bit what works for your pain.As a rule of thumb you want your paint to have a consistency of skimmed milk I don’t know if that helps but it’s supposed to be watery and kind of run down from the edge of your cup, but not too thin, and you just have to try it out and figure what works for you, and it takes a few times to get the hang off, maybe you will clog your air brush up a few times before you nail your perfect consistency, but it’s totally worth it in the long run to learn how to mix the paint in the cup shoot started it up you mix your paints and started air brushing and now you need to clean it let’s talk about something you should actually do before you start painting with your air brush I recommend you to pull the air brush apart and see what all the parts are where they fit and how your air brushes constructed get a few for which part goes where and what function they actually have on your air brush and why you should do this is because.When you start painting if you get a clog or when you start cleaning you don’t understand where the bits go you’re in a bit of a trouble so getting a good feel for your air brush will really help you in the long run again and what this has to do with cleaning will touch on that in a bit, and if you watched an air brush video before you’ve probably seen at least a couple of different ways of cleaning your air brush and everyone swears by different ways of cleaning your air brush and most ways are totally fine, but now I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned what I found works the best in what saves me the most time when painting but keeps me a rush at a high level and keeps it from breaking so you’re spraying with different paints and you want to clean it up a bit before adding the new paint you pour the excess in your cup into a garbage bin or container you didn’t take a bit of water into the cup, give it some back flow again as you did when you mix the paints you empty, the cup and spray out all the excess that’s left in your nozzle when I’ve done that.Take some paper and clean the inside of the cup to remove all the paint that’s in the cup, you don’t repeat this process again, you probably won’t have to use the paper but you add the water you give it a back flow it, spray out the nozzle and you empty it, you might have to do this two or three times for all the paint to be removed from the cup and the inside of your air brush, so when you don’t see any paint in your cup when doing the back flow and you spray with your air brush on a piece of paper and it’s completely clear your all done, this is something you need to get a good routine of doing and if you get a good routine, it will be a super fast process and you can move from one point to the other quickly without having to stop and the better your air brush hygiene is while painting the longer your air brush will last, and you’ll have a more consistent result from it and the next thing we need to discuss is when you’re finished for the day, so what I do is I clean it up the way I did in between every paint and then fill it with a bit of air brush cleaner and then take A Q tip.And dip it around in the cleaner in the cup and stir it around to clean the inside of the air brush and then spin it around the tip of the needle to clean the needle top and then pull the lever back to pull the needle all the way into the air brush and then push the q tip around to clean the nozzle and the air regulator of the air brush make sure to do this properly push it around, stir it around a bit, maybe push down the lever to get some back flow again and you want to do this because you don’t want any pain to be stuck between the nozzle and the air regulator press down the lever to push some air through the regulator and this way you remove any excess paint or any excess air brush cleaner and if you don’t do this properly, you will have paint dried up in both your nozzle and your air regulator and if you have that you will either clog up your air brush or get an uneven flow of air and your painful becomes beckley will just ruin your miniatures, so make sure to have a good average hygiene, it’s one of the most important things when using an air brush and getting a good routine.That because if you don’t you’re gonna ruin your miniature’s by having an uneven flow from your air brush and once in a while, this won’t happen too often if you take care of your air brush, but once in awhile your air brush will clog up either you forgot some pains in it, or it didn’t clean it properly, or maybe some of your paints had particles in it that’s a bit too thick to spray out of your nozzle, and when this happens, you have to pull your ambush apart again and clean it thoroughly, this is not something you should have to do every time you’re using your air brush and pulling it apart and cleaning it too many times might create micro scratches and ruin your average in the long run, you will lessen your performance quite quickly if you do this every day, so just do this, when you really have to I found that most of the times when I have a problem, it’s it’s either in the needle, the nozzle or the air regulator you remove the needle from the air brush, take a bit of paper and soak it with a bit of air brush cleaner, you didn’t clean the needle by moving the paper in the direction of the needle, you don’t want to go back and forth because it’s super easy to destroy the tip of.Need to just move it the same way as the air flows on the needle from the bottom, and this is also where we used the inter dental brushes I talked about earlier, if you dip them in some air brush cleaner, you can clean the inside of your nozzle and the air regulator, if you get an inter dental brush made of metal, incredibly careful so you don’t scratch the inside of the nozzle and sometimes you find a lot of dried up paint in your nozzle, then you might have to go in with the tip of your needle as well don’t push your needle into the insides of the nozzle put in gently into the center and then push the sides of the needle around to scrape off the paint inside the nozzle, you will feel quite instantly, if you have dried up paint in your nozzle, just make sure to scrape it off using the side of your needle not to tip and be incredibly careful when doing this because you don’t want to damage the tip of your needle and have to buy a new needle and when you scrape it off the sides of the nozzle, just push it through the tip of your nozzle, and then take my q tip dip it in some ebert cleaner then clean the inside of the cup and.Inside of the air brush, if this is not enough to solve your problems using the inter dental brushes going into the air brush again and just pick it apart and clean every part this way, but these first steps should be way enough, if you’re taking care of your air brush, these are just the beginning steps of your air brush painting journey and in the future I will be doing another video using the air brush, I’ll be going more into detail I will be showing you some tips and tricks that I’ve learned through my time using an air brush suggest a hit the subscribe button, if you want to see that in the future I also release new videos every week, so make sure to subscribe for hobby tips painting tutorials or just fun times with hobbies, don’t forget to like the video leave a comment if you have any questions share it with a friend, if you have someone who might learn something from watching this video and with that said guys have a great day, bye, oh I almost forgot this video by the way is sponsored by my patron supporters.
