Trying to paint by airbrush ?

Learning About Airbrush Painting Techniques

Anyone can learn some things about airbrush painting techniques. Putting them into practice is where you want to get to. This style of painting with an airbrush is uniquely different from all other forms of painting. If you make a mistake in airbrushing, it's really unforgiving. Laying on too many layers causes the paint to be too thick, and it takes on an undesirable quality.

Surface

The surfaces you intend to paint with an airbrush, need to be dealt with very carefully. Any time you touch a surface with a finger, the oils from your finger get transferred to your painting surface. Then this causes a reaction with your water-based acrylic paint, because oil and water, as we know, don't mix. So special care should be taken in the handling of the surface to be painted.

Airbrush Control

Anytime you're involved in airbrush painting, your technique becomes a very important part of the process. Getting a feel and an understanding of the airbrush itself is also extremely important. You need to practice getting good at spreading a good even flow of paint using the airbrush. You can control your spray diameter by moving closer or further from the surface you're painting. The best way to approach it is starting far away and working your way in closer. Once you begin to learn a few airbrush painting techniques you'll understand that you want to build the paint density in a slow manner. You can dilute the paint in order to help with this. The best type of airbrush is a dual-action airbrush. This kind of airbrush will be able to handle airflow regulation and color quantity at the same time. They are the best airbrushes to use, and are simply called 'Double-action' airbrushes. Be sure to have a good strong compressor as well.

Shadows

Painting shadows is done quite easily. You start by using a simple black paint. It should be diluted for getting a good fine color spread. Then, you want to lay it on from far back and thin, so you don't get the color too dark too quickly. Painting reflections or highlights, is achieved by laying on less paint. This will enable the white paper or light surface background to show through. It's good for creating light edges too.

Masking

Whenever you begin to paint objects within a painting ground, you'll want to make use of a masking film. If you have a cube shape in your picture, you draw it with a pencil. Then you lay on the masking film over the whole picture. Now you take a cutter, and cut out your cube, life off the film, and paint the cube. Save the film that came off the cube, so you can recover it when you paint the other parts of your picture.

Gradual Tones

Gradual tones can be created by laying down a dark line of the color you're using, with a fair amount of paint being laid on, and staying approximately 20mm away from the surface. As you spray right to left, you lay down a line. As you begin to move up or down, you simply pull farther away and lay down a thinner layer of paint, overlapping your first line by about half. Apply less paint as you continue to move, whether up or down. Then you'll see it go from darker to lighter.