I lost track of the part number, and they don’t matter anyway.
This thing is now more Oxid Paste than anything else. Here’s a photo from after I took off all of the heavy objects. It’s glued to the hardboard fairly well.
We got together again tonight and I worked on a backing while Patrick carved out his castle some more. The castle is amazing. Just you wait until you see it!
We took it and my airbrush downstairs and started to spray it black. We had been looking for a product called Krylon H2O that Kas had recommended, but we couldn’t find it in the city so we decided to just spray with acrylic paint and hope. Most of the board is covered in texture anyway.
I have a confession to make. My airbrush is expensive, full of effort and more often than not doesn’t do what I wanted it to do. I can count 3 times when it succeeded at the task I gave it. My ork plane, some terrain I was spraying random earth colours on, and this one time I sprayed Jamie’s tanks. Every other times, the paint is to thick, or to thin, it runs all over the place, gets clogged up in the nozzle, or I’ve lost a part and didn’t know it or it just gets everywhere. It takes a while to take out, and a while to clean up and put away. My airbrush embarrasses me.
The problem this time, was that even once I had a decent mix of the paint, there was no coverage. It was either doing solid thin lines, or transparent medium-sized lines and there was no way we were going to cover the board with it.
I know you can get different sized needles and nozzles for different applications, and I’m wondering if I have a particularly thin set up right now.
We quickly adjusted, putting the airbrush down, grabbing a container lid and our largest brushes and got to work painting black everywhere. In the morning I pulled out my spray primer and went outside to cover up the areas that we’d missed.
We’re ready to put some colours on this thing!
4 Comments
Kelly
March 24, 2014 at 2:02 pmWhat size needle are you using on your airbrush?
Craig Fleming
March 24, 2014 at 2:50 pmI have the Badger Patriot brush, which I believe comes by default with a 0.75mm needle.
http://www.amazon.ca/Badger-Air-Brush-Patriot-Gravity-Airbrush/dp/B002W84GTO
Does this give you useful information? (it’s hard for me to tell if it’s useful or not, I still don’t understand most of airbrushing…>.<)
Kelly
March 24, 2014 at 4:11 pm0.75mm? I’m relatively new to airbrushing myself, but that should be plenty big for airbrushing terrain. As I understand it, the larger the needle size, the less prone it is to tip-dry and clogs.
That being said, perhaps I should correct myself a bit (after looking back and seeing the size of your board). I’ve had reasonably good success with my .50mm needle for regular pieces of terrain (towers and the like), but never had to paint something the size of a game board. Maybe a spray gun, like what you’d find in a hardware store, would be better for such a huge piece. They have large jars on there, so you can load up a huge amount of paint / primer at one go, and have big triggers so you can use more than one finger to activate the spray (less finger fatigue). They are equivalent to single-action, so no adjusting the spray by finger motions, but that should be okay if you’re just trying to get a big spray anyway. I can also see the advantage of using a spray gun over spray cans, in that the spray doesn’t require a chemical propellant (which often “melts” the insulation foam used in many terrain projects)… just a good compressor. I’m a bit concerned that a hobby sized compressor might build up moisture quickly if used for long sustained spraying though, which would affect the consistency of your paint / primer, and cause some spitting as the compressor warmed up.
If primering with an airbrush, I’ve had reasonably good success with Vallejo primer. It comes in a big dropper bottle, and is pre-thinned to airbrush readiness. Or so they say. I’ve had to thin mine down on occasion with some airbrush thinner. But it’s great to have the option of airbrushing primer on my models indoors when the weather outside is really cold and / or humid… spray cans are often nasty in those conditions.
A really great article for anyone considering airbrushing miniatures is one written by Mathieu Fontaine:
http://www.akaranseth.com/blog/tutorials/airbrushing-for-figurine.htm
I understand he may be sponsored by Badger now, so he does tout their line quite a bit. However, his results are no worse than his previous results with the various high end airbrushes he used in the past, so I take that to mean that Badgers are just as good as any other brand out there, if not better.
Anyway, it really does come down to trial and error with airbrushes, in my limited experience. Most of the time, I don’t even bother breaking out the airbrush, for the many reasons you detailed (the cleaning, mostly… egads, the cleaning!). It rarely seems like I end up saving any time at all over a traditional brush. Maybe with more practice, it’ll be worth it, but right now it’s still such a pain in the butt for me.
Craig Fleming
March 26, 2014 at 1:59 pmI believe you are right. Here’s the article on the Patriot needle size: http://wgconsortium.blogspot.ca/2013/03/the-patriot-105-airbrush-conversion-kits.html The spray was about half an inch thick, when it gave good coverage, and probably 3 inches thick when it was giving very poor coverage.
Where do you mix your paint? I hate mixing in a jar, because half the paint stays in the jar!
I’ve been thinking about getting this beast: http://www.chicagoairbrushsupply.com/badgermodel3501.html if Badger is selling at AdeptiCon. Not for fine detail work, it would give me a variety of tools to choose from.
I read the Mathieu articles a few times, after he came to Vancouver a few years ago. Unfortunately, as you say, trial and error is the best teacher for this stuff!