Rangers

Let me first say that these models are some fantastic sculpts for being part of a unit. Easily my favorite sculpts of all the Cygnar units. For my paint scheme though they caused me a little challenge since I didn't want to go with additional colors in the mix and kept it strictly to my metal/black/blue/red scheme. I could have probably done a bit more with it, but having finished them I do like the sort of understated look of these guys. They got done pretty quick thanks mainly to using the airbrush to do all the main cloth work. Once that was done it was just accentuating shadows and then detail work.

Major Victoria Haley

This was a fast but very fun project. After stripping her once to start over, this second time around I opted to use the airbrush to do the base layers of the cloak. This worked out really well. I did probably 75% of the work this way, and since her cloak is 80% of the model it really sped things up dramatically. It's really a lovely model and I could have done far more if I'd wanted to paint to a higher than tabletop standard. One thing special I did with the cloak was take the shadows all the way to pure black and take the tip highlights all the way to pure white. I really like the resultant effect it creates for the model overall.

Airbrush Class Review

Sunday I went up to the Secret Weapon Miniatures' headquarters and attended an airbrush training class with Mister Justin himself. This was a rare treat as he's become a very busy man these days. There were 14 of us in the class and it was a very hands-on class. Besides being a rather noisy situation due to all the compressors (especially 1 very loud shop-style compressor), it was a pretty nice environment to work in for the task at hand. I got a solid 4 hours worth of time directly working with my airbrush and many times got to ask Justin questions to help debug problems, get advice and generally improve my confidence in using the airbrush.

This GW Ogre Bull model pictured here is my output from the class. Not particularly amazing except for the fact that all of that work was done entirely with an airbrush. I did some masking obviously to prevent overspray on key areas, but I didn't do anything with a brush. He's clearly not going to win any awards, but I'm somewhat shocked at what I did pull off on what is a relatively small model for my skill levels. Up close (and from other angles) you can totally find several small spatters and "spider webs" where the paint got away from me, but that's all part of the learning process. I focused on just using the airbrush to re-do problem areas rather than just give up. I will admit that at one point I nearly said "screw it", but rather than surrender, I took a moment to pause and look at what my peers were doing which helped me feel like I wasn't the only one feeling frustrated. As one other classmate said aptly, "this is a great opportunity to get a month's worth of mistakes done in a single day and get help rather than getting frustrated".

So what did I learn?

• Practice with coloring books. They are cheap and provide a great canvas to just fool around on and not stress about "ruining" it.
• Everything you can do with an airbrush, you can do with a brush. This might seem obvious, but keeping this in mind, the airbrush should be thought of as a time-saving tool. If the work is getting too difficult to accomplish with an airbrush, switch to a traditional brush.
• Models are just 2D surfaces mapped onto a 3D object. It's a matter of painting each of the 2D canvases on that 3D model. With that in mind though...
• Everything is a sphere. Muscles, faces, and so on are basically constructed of lots of spheres and each one needs highlighting and shading appropriately so that they make visual sense on the model.
• Use a sculpting tool to gently push in the edges of painters tape when masking helps improve the accuracy of the masking effort. This works particularly well on areas where the edge of that tape can be pushed into a crease.
• There's no one answer to any airbrush problem. For example, if the paint seems too thin and is spiderwebbing, one option is to dial back the max paint on the airbrush, leave the pressure the same, and work in shorter bursts. This leads me to a very important point I learned...
• Unlike the brush where much of the learning is by "feel" and "intuition", the airbrush requires a fair amount more disciplined practice. It is important to actually understand all of the factors in play such as viscosity, air pressure and such. This requires measured experimentation to work through as much as getting a familiar feel for it.

Some other quick notes from the class:
P3 paints and Daler Rowney Inks are both liquid pigments and thus work great in the airbrush. I'd never thought to run inks through the airbrush, but it does work great.
91% isopropyl alcohol for cleaning.
Thin with water only.
Don't use the reservoir cup. I was amused that Justin never used a reservoir cup on his airbrushes. Just dumped paint directly into the top with the cup off. Makes sense in hindsight since the cups are generally way larger than needed for small work.
0.2 needle for detail work. 0.5 for general work.
Get some airbrush lube. I desperately need to do this after (at the end of the class) doing a complete strip-down of my Infinity.
Justin has lots of hilarious stories about great painters doing amusing things. A couple times I was paralyzed with laughter.

Also got to see the SW warehouse and production areas which was a fun bonus. Ok, enough typing. It's time to get paint on a model while I'm riding a wave of motivation.

Review: Vallejo Surface Primer

For the longest time I have been a die hard fan of Duplicolor Sandable Primer. Until today. I got a tip from my friend Bryan about using Vallejo Surface Primer and spraying it on using an airbrush. Now at first I was a bit skeptical, but Bryan is a very reliable source of information and I figured I'd give it a try. A few clicks later and a 200ml bottle of white primer was on its way. It sat on my desk for a few days since I was still focused on finishing up Bishop and needed to decide what to prep. I also spent a little time building a better (and collapsable) backstop for airbrushing in front of. Last night I broke out my low grade airbrush and primed 3 models. So how did it go?

The Good:
This is really amazing. The Vallejo Surface Primer is good to begin with, but using it through the airbrush is almost effortlessly perfect. The primer itself goes on nice and smooth and works well. The biggest problems I've always had with it pooling and not getting proper coverage was due to using a normal brush. But with the airbrush I can easily get a nice thin even coat over the whole model and do it really quickly. I even did a little test painting already on the coat and paint adheres to it really well. Plus the benefit of being able to prime indoors without nasty fumes is just enormous, especially with winter setting in. No more fears of grainy primer coats ruining an otherwise good model!

The Bad:
Honestly the only drawback is the setup time to use the airbrush as opposed to the spray can. It also requires a bit more attention to cleaning than normal due to it being primer. Beyond that small time investment, I'm hard pressed to find another drawback.

The Verdict:
I don't see that I'll be using can primer again unless I'm in a huge rush. The benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. I highly recommend that anyone out there with an airbrush look into doing it this way if you aren't already. Now I just need to order some in black and grey and I'm off to the races.

From the Desk: Archangel Painting Started

I had intended to do my Lock and Load wrap up post, but I got distracted and wanted to post this up real fast.

So first of all I want to sing the praises of this small device, and especially for Ron Kruzie for the tip about it. It's basically a small filter made from tubing, pantyhose, and a rubber band. It fits nicely into the paint well of my airbrush and makes it easy to strain for granules that could clog the airbrush. It's simple and elegant and works really well. I tried both with and without and definitely had a smoother result with it. Of course, I did get interesting looks from the checkout clerk when I was buying all these supplies, but that's part of the fun of having this hobby.

So what did I get done? Well some base coating of the wings and initial highlighting and shading work. There's plenty more to do, but this really did get a ton of baseline work done. Next step will be to add some texture, glaze it, and then deepen the shadows.

Ok, enough for tonight. There should be far more regular posts from me over the next couple weeks due to a big break from work and life craziness. I'm looking forward to getting a lot of painting time in.

From the Desk: Weekend Roundup #23

Day late post because of the 3 day weekend.

First picture is of the main Judicator progress. The main torso is now attached to the legs which makes the whole thing start to feel a little more like it's coming together. There's still touch ups and work to do in general, but it was too hard to work with the torso piece separately anymore so I got it 80% done and attached it. The really big question I now have is how to manage the final painting on this beast once it's fully assembled, since there's going to be a lot of final work to do to make the whole model look cohesive, not to mention clean up a bunch of stuff.

I also got a bunch of base coating work done on the remaining parts as well as detailing work on the shoulders. I actually got pretty brave (for me) with the airbrush at this point and did some highlighting on the shoulders. There was a bit of over-spray since I wasn't using any masking for it, but nothing that I can't quickly clean up.

And now a WIP shot of Rask. He's been the project I work on while washes on the Judicator were drying. He's coming along quite well and I expect to have him done by the next weekend despite the amount of work left to do.

And just a few random notes about painting and life this week:

I got a really great tip on using the airbrush this week from my friend David: Mix my paint in a paint well and then transfer it to the airbrush. As simple as this sounds, it really made a huge difference. I already feel more comfortable about it. I've also ordered a whole pile of pipettes to make it easier to transfer paint with.

My son turned 3 this weekend. Nothing to do with painting. I'm just really happy to see him grow up.

Finally, I enjoyed the self-imposed painting challenge for GRR so much that I'm going to try and do more of those sorts of challenges. My current one is to have the Judicator finished before my next game of Warmachine (probably Wednesday or Thursday). Of course the odds of that are pretty low honestly, but the challenge still stands and I'm taking it seriously in an attempt to pull it off. Worse case scenario, I hope to have Rask finished so I can field him instead.

From the Desk: Airbrush Update

Another weekend down, and unfortunately it hasn't been as productive as I was hoping for. Before I get to the meat of my post (an update on my airbrush experience), just a couple quick notes. First, I rounded out my collection of Secret Weapon washes. I've found them to be an invaluable part of my painting arsenal. I sometimes use them straight for painting rather than washing, just because they are already pre-thinned to a level that is not that far off from what I would thin to anyway. Second is that despite not being close to fully painted on Gators yet, I bought a couple more models for my force. It was sort of a bit of retail therapy, given the chaos that has been going on in other parts of my life. Anyway, on to the important part.

I managed to break out the airbrush again over the weekend as a part of working on, what is for now, a secret project. That will get revealed in a couple more days. However, during this airbrushing exercise I was using my P3 paints instead of the VMA ones. Overall they worked fine, but it was challenging to get the right thinning. Everything was going fine at first. Then while secret project was drying, I swapped to start base coating the Throne of Everblight, and disaster. A chunk of paint got lodged and I had to disassemble the entire airbrush to clean it. And I mean the entire thing. That led me to think about airbrushing in general.

What I like about this airbrush is 1) it was cheap, and 2) it's good initial practice with double action. What I don't like, well, that's a long list, but the highlights are 1) it's not gravity fed, 2) it's a monstrous pain in the ass to clean, 3) it's not exactly the most finely tuned instrument.

With all this in mind, I've initiated a countdown. Once I have used this airbrush a total of 10 times (and I'm at 4 now), I'll indulge myself in buying a better one. I also need to find a better system for getting it set up and in a usable state than hauling everything downstairs, setting it up, and then hauling it back upstairs once I'm done.

From the Desk: Droppers!

So I finally bit the bullet and transferred all my P3 paints into dropper bottles. It was a fair amount of work, but I believe it was worth the effort. I first considered doing this when I started a black and white study piece and made up some of my own shades of grey using P3 white and black. As a part of doing this, I mixed them and put them in droppers which turned out to be not as hard as I expected, and well worth the effort in terms of speed and simplicity. Making the leap to do the rest of them in droppers only took a slight extra nudge, courtesy of Justin.

Now, knowing that this isn't for everyone, I'm not going to promote that everyone run out and do this. I will however share my reasons for going through this effort:

1. Droppers are easier to use with an airbrush
2. I'm always thinning my paint now, so using a dropper helps me maintain better ratios of water to paint
3. When mixing multiple paints, droppers are just faster than using a brush to scoop and mix
4. When mixing multiple paints, droppers are definitely more precise
5. After 20 years of painting on and off, and trying out 9 different lines of paints, I just happen to like droppers better

From the Desk: First Adventure with the Airbrush

Today I tried out my airbrush for the first time. Almost a year ago I purchased this airbrush kit and had yet to actually use it. I'd done a little reading but decided that, like painting, there's a lot of merit to just jumping in and trying it out. There's plenty of resources out there about airbrushing so I'm not going to turn this post into a how-to, especially since I'm still a complete neophyte. Instead, this is just going to be a bunch of my observations and outcome from this first experience. None of my painted subjects are impressive by any stretch, as they were really just target practice.

The picture here shows my workspace after the experiment. This brings me to the first note I feel was key to a successful first try: Have a backstop. I built a quick cardboard backstop to make sure that overspray was caught and didn't destroy my dining table.

Getting everything set up and started was easier than I expected, probably because everything came in a single kit. The airbrush I got is a dual action which is more flexible, but also has a steeper learning curve obviously. This brings me to my second observation: Fine control is more challenging that I expected. This is an obvious "duh" sort of comment, but I can't understate just how much I expect practice to play into it.

On the flipside, it occurred to me between coats of paint that there was usually leftover paint in the reservoir. Rather than just immediately dump it to prepare for the next coat of whatever, I opted for the following: Use leftover paint for practice. Even just practicing on the backstop was incredibly helpful.

When it came to actually applying paint, the reservoir works a little funky (it's below and draws paint up into the airbrush). I found it challenging to keep the right angle to the reservoir and also apply paint at the same time. To that end: Moving the target around instead of the airbrush made for a smoother process. There's definitely a happy middle ground here as moving the airbrush is necessary, but changing its angle is what caused more of the problems than anything else. Again, lots more practice will help I'm sure.

So obviously just practicing with the airbrush is going to be a major part of getting better, just like with painting. Some of the logistical stuff like getting more efficient with set up, changing paints, cleaning, and tear down will make a difference in overcoming the inertia of just doing it. However my goal this first time was really just to have a first try at it. It's part of a new psychological strategy I have for my New Year's Resolutions: Commit to doing something once and let the repetition follow after overcoming the hurdle of the first time. It worked great with the gym, and hopefully it'll be the same with the airbrush.

I can definitely say that I intend to use it for a lot of base coating, particularly for metals, since it makes things really fast and smooth. Even just doing this will make for a good bit of practice toward refining my sense of the controls.

Ok, enough typing. It's time to get back to actual painting. Hopefully this will be the first of many uses of the airbrush in the future.