Entering the Airbrush Era - Beginnings

Back to my original story...

The first day I got my airbrush the first thing I did was read the instruction manual. As I've mentioned before, I get some of my best ideas on my throne so I took the manual with me and read it over thoroughly.

Luckily the manual was written in many languages, one of them being English and it came with a lot of diagrams and illustrations.

After I got an idea of how the process works and learned about the parts of the airbrush and learned how to set it up AND learned what to watch out for, I gave it a shot.

First was the paint. I have a lot of paint. I recieved a very large paint set almost 10 years ago from my ex-gf but never really used it the way I should have. She bought me this VF-1A 30th Anniversary Valkyrie to go with it.

She was with me in a Japanese souvenir shop back home and we were looking at the models and she really liked the SD-Gundam Zeta series set so I bought it for her. She kept the Hyaku Shiki and the Zeta but the gave the Mark 2 Titans to me because she knew how much I liked that suit and she thought it'd look cute next to my MG Mark 2 Titans. Sweet girl. Later on that year she got me the paint set.

Anyways... another gf after her gave me even more paint (because I left the first batch back in Canada and I met this gf in Japan and had no paint with me) which was very nice of her. I used that paint on the 1/100 Red Frame, of the OYW White Demon. After I went back to Canada I brought all the paint back with me along with a couple of models. I don't know why I did that. I just didn't want to leave them at home for some reason. I felt that I could finally do them justice now that I've increased my skill set.

I only brought back two out of purely sentimental reasons. The first was the 30th Anniversary Valkyrie that I mentioned before. The second was the first model I ever bought. The Sentinel (nickname for my no-grade S Gundam.)

It was in a semi-sad state of disrepair and I thought that I would finally be able to 'resurrect' it.

Sad to say that day has yet to come and I'm not sure when it will. So much to build... so little time!

I'd always hoped to be able to finish these machines properly once I got enough skills... AND the right equipment. I think I'm there now. I believe that I can do it but there are other things that are taking priority now.

So now I have a LOT of enamel paint from back home and these two old school models that I'm probably not going to work on for some time. First things first. Use up the paint.

I tested out the airbrush initially with just some regular black that I had laying around. The paint had long since settled at the bottom of the jar but I stirred it up a bit with a toothpick, poured a VERY small amount into the airbrush paint canister and mixed in a little enamel thinner until I got it too a very runny consistency (comparable to skim milk).

I tried it out first on a cut up milk carton and played around with the brush a bit, trying to figure out what everything did and how I could use it. Also took note of distances from brush to surface and what kind of painting effects I could get when I varied pressure and distance.

After all of that I tried it out on my first piece, that being the sinanju bazooka.

Since then I haven't used it as much as I thought I would but I'm glad I have it regardless. I still do a fair amount of hand painting but for the recolours I often do, this device is sure to come in handy.

I'm learning as I go obviously but that is the reason why I created this blog after all!