Airbrushing practice

[Nutter]

What do you (or did you) find helpful for practicing airbrushing (especially the basic techniques/control), besides actually painting bodies? I'm thinking both materials and techniques.

Right now I'm practicing basic techniques like straight lines, curves, dots, circles, spirals, etc (all freehand, tracing over pencil lines) on large sheets of thick paper (the kind you get at craft stores) - they have plenty of room to try variations of everything, and both a shiney and matt side. The matt side is quite forgiving since it absorbs a lot of the excess paint, while the shiney side is a closer to the behaviour of bodies as any excess paint will be blown around by the air pressure. Of course, there's also transparency film, though I'm holding off on that until I get some more basic control of the airbrush down.

I have a small book on airbrushing from Barrons that goes through a lot of these basic techniques, all the way up to quite advanced freehand airbrushing. When I say 'small book', I do mean it - the book is thinner than an average issue of RCCA with much thicker pages, and is half the page size as well. As such, it does not go into very much detail on anything, but then it doesn't need to either; the message is clear - "here's what you need to practice, now practice it". I'd recommend the book to anyone looking to become more competent at airbrushing, as I am. The books name is simply "Airbrush", from Barron's Art Handbooks.

Here's an example of what I'm doing (the big black mark in the lower-left is a paint spill):
http://www.devras.com/rc/painting_lesson_01.jpg

[dyslexic]

I got most of my intro to airbrushing at this site how-to-airbrush (http://www.howtoairbrush.com/Lindex.htm)
There full of good tips on how to clean your brush and the list goes on.

As for practice I use big ol pads of newsprint, it's probably a bit cheaper then the stuff your useing right now I got a large pad for about 2$ at the art supply store.

I have a few books I orderd from amazon but they mainly deal with illustration and T-shirt airbrushing as well as 1:1 cars, not one of them even has a page on painting lexan bodies.

for lexan painting tips I found this article to be very helpfull HM's painting guide (http://www.rctech.net/articles/painting_hauntedmyst.shtml)

[mikevillena]

Thanks for this post guys, I'm going to check out the book and the site.

[AirBoston]

Dots. Dots. More dots. You need to get the feel for how the brush works... hold on a minute. I'm assuming you have a dual action. If it's a single action, then things change a bit.

1st dots. Fill a page (keep in columns and rows) with the EXACT same size dots. Do this several times and keep a couple of the best ones for later.

2nd Moving Dots. (Dual Action). Learn to keep the air on all the time. Just like the dots practice, do the same except dont stop, make a dot, move over, stop, make a dot, move over... This time keep moving. You'll notice the dots start skinny, get fat, and end skinny. This is the start of the "flare" stroke. Do this for many pages.

3rd Lines. Paint straight lines in every direction; up, down, left, right, diagnal left, diagnal right, diagnal up left, diagnal up right, etc. Keep the lines equil thickness.

4th More lines. Just like step 3, do the same, but this time make parallel lines, trhe same thichness as the others. Do at least 10-20 sets in every direction.

5th Control. Dig out those pages of dots. paint straight lines from one dot to the next. Don't always pick the closest dot to paint your line to. Don't always pick left, right, ip and down, but go diagnally too. The more you do, the more control you'll gain.

6th flare. Pick a point to start, think about a point to end. Start with your dot then move while decreasing the amount of paint untill no more paint is flowing (keep moving for a bit after). The longer/ slower you shut off the paint, the longer the flare. This is used in tee painting for palms, grass, letters, etc. For RC it is used for drop shadows, depth of color etc.

Master these steps and you on your way to paint anything. Airbrush action is a great resource. Their videos, while pricey are also very good.

My tip is to look at every type of airbrush painting. You can learn a lot from a tee shirt painter, motorcycle painter, car painter, RC painter, Fine Art painter, etc. They all use these basic techniques.

[Nutter]

To resurrect this thread from the depths of the forum.. :p

I've recently picked up two more airbrushing books, "The Ultimate Airbrush Handbook" by Pamela Shanteau, and "Advanced Airbrush Art: How to Secrets from the Masters" by Timothy Remus.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0823055744/ref=pd_sim_b_3/103-2760196-8880611?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance
The first, TUAH, has quite a lot of different types of airbrushing discussed, and a lot of introductory information. However, I haven't really looked at it a lot yet since it just doesn't seem terribly useful. Flicking through, it does go into some quite detailed steps, so I may very well be wrong here.. I'll come back and add more comments once I've read it more.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1929133200/qid=1119419522/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_ur_1/103-2760196-8880611?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
The second though, AAA, is great - it only concerns itself with airbrushing motorbikes, but it does it excellently. It's full of beautiful full colour, clear photos and explanations of each step of the paint jobs, of which there are 10 by 10 separate artists. Each paint job is definitely a serious work of both art and skill, and just seeing the works come together and be polished as details are added is amazing. Flicking through the pages you're just flooded with examples and ideas for your own paint jobs.. I think absolutely everyone here will get a LOT from this book, and I highly recommend it!

[LEADFOOT]

I have the Craig Frasier book, and I know there are others on here that do as well, and I found it pretty useful. There are some technique descriptions in there, but most can't be done on a 1/10 scale painted inside out. There are a lot of templates used as well as free hand shields, which I have starting using more....just homemade ones.