To help me enjoy painting more and paint more consistently I've been going into models and writing down specific things I want to achieve. I plan the paint scheme ahead of time and what technique I want to use/practice.
In this instance I was looking to brush up on my air brushing skills. It's been a long time since I've done it and I've got some really nice models I need to use it for. (I have a couple of Imperial Knights waiting, for example. Not models you want to use a brush on)
As mentioned in a previous post, I have a problem with patience, blockages and cleaning. Of the airbrush, I mean.
When painting this I made myself slow down a bit and clean out the airbrush whenever the flow started to change or it felt/sounded different. Theres a characteristic sound to paint that's flowing neatly and a distinct change when it's interfered with. Even though I was taking it apart and cleaning it out fairly frequently at the beginning, doing it properly meant I wasn't letting huge problems build up that required dedicated fixing. After a while, as I got used to using the kit again, the problems became less frequent and overall things sped up and became more fun.
I still had problems with the surface my paint was leaving behind. A problem on two fronts: paint wasn't sticking to my primer properly and wiping off the moment it brushed again something. I had to touch up all the edges and corners with thicker and thicker paint using a brush before I could take my finished photos. Second problem: graininess.
I dont know if you can tell in these photos but the base coat colour (A 2:1 mix of dark angels green and chaos black, thinned about 1:1 paint to vallejo airbrush thinner) was leaving behind a minutely speckled surface. The kind that needs stripping and redoing to fix properly. It happens because paint is drying en route to the model. Forms tiny dry spheres before meeting the surface and getting sealed into place.
As mentioned in my previous airbrushing post, this can be down to many factors. There's no real formula to stopping it happening because you can change each of these things in different ways to come up with a unique solution.
I changed a lot while I was working and ended up in the general situation of keeping the 1:1 paint to thinner ratio, a PSI ~ 12-20, and working a few inches from the surface. Keeping on top of the state of the tip/cap and stopping before blockages helped prevent paint drying or blobbing as well.
Moving on to the green elements and the glows the smoothness of the paint improved greatly. In fact, it was originally much better than you can see in the pictures above. I was trying to build up really thin layers while putting down the green blends and had a few incidents of pooling paint and creating tide lines/spider legs but nothing I couldn't fix.
I reached a point where I was really happy how those parts had come out, not least of all because I had found with very careful manipulation I could use my Iwata Neo to paint lines as thin as the dividing sections on the hull of the scythe.
To make it really pop I wanted to use a yellow glaze. Oh I thought the yellow glaze would look great!
Fuck the yellow glaze.
I used a brush to paint the games workshop glaze over the sections. It was fine while I doing it. I looked back half an hour later to see if everything had set to find that it had resolvated the lower layer of paints and then dried in all the edges, like I'd put a thick wash on too soon.
Partially my fault - I need to add more matt medium to the mixture when I'm using super thin layers because they keep lifting if I use a brush on them. Or just continue airbrushing over it. I'm flipping the bird at the glaze though. I put on a thin, careful layer. It ended up slipping about like a wash and ruining the smooth surface.
Overall though, good practice piece. Fixed a lot of problems. Sadly I just found the model unpleasant to paint on top of being ham handed about it. It will go into a foam case until I did it out and strip it in a couple of years, hopeful that I'll enjoy it this time.
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