RangerTheCowPony wrote:I’m going to start customizing breyers/resins soon, and I’m looking at buying an airbrush. Are there any tips for me? I currently do digital horse designs with an airbrush tool and I was wondering if color matching and stacking was anything like that? I currently start with the lightest color from the flank and layer colors on the barrel, neck, and rump keeping the flank, muzzle, and armpits light in color. I know that I have to water down acrylics for the airbrush, and I have a paint concealing pen to airbrush white markings with. Does anyone have a specific airbrush that is good for beginners that I should buy? What brand of paint do you guys use? I have a budget of about 130 dollars including paints and other materials.
Thank you for reading this huge wall of text! I’m super excited to get started 🥺
Awesome! I highly recommend it. I invested in an airbrush at the beginning of this year and love it. Like you, I was interested to see if it layered the same way as with digital horse coloring. It is kind of similar - start with your lightest color and cover the whole body in it, continue to get darker very SLOWLY by adding a few drops of the darker color to the paint cup that's already full of the base, mixing, doing another layer, so on and so forth until you reach the darker color in the desired areas. Going slow with your layers is key, otherwise you'll see paint splatter texture and a more sharp divide of colors. It's not like in Oekaki where you can just lower the opacity, you have to help it make the transition from one color to the next. Airbrushes in general also just need some getting used to. I watched a ton of videos on airbrushing to get started and I recommend the same - they have lots of great tips on even simply handling the airbrush. It's definitely a different feel than other mediums!
As for products, unfortunately airbrushing stuff is quite expensive. I do recommend getting an Iwata airbrush. The Neo is supposedly very beginning friendly and not too expensive (I think it's usually around $60-70). I have an Iwata Eclipse and I love it and found it was highly recommended for beginners and advanced airbrushers alike - however that alone would eat up almost exactly your budget. I'd look into the Neo!
The other expensive part of airbrushing is the air compressor. Not sure if you have one yet or not, but you can get relatively inexpensive compressors off of amazon or similar. I went kind of pricy with mine because I live in an apartment and I didn't want something super noisy or constantly running, so it has an air reservoir that it uses up and refills rather than just compressing constantly. Unfortunately, those tend to run a good $300+. But like I said, if noise isn't an issue for you, there are perfectly capable and great compressors under $70.
Also, a lot of art stores have bundles (with airbrush, compressor, and a hose or two) that may be cheaper than buying everything separately. I did that and I'm glad I did.
I use exclusively Golden High Flow acrylics for painting. You don't need to water them down - they can go straight into the airbrush since they are made for that. I find they go on very smoothly and have a range of opaqueness. I don't think I'll ever use anything else! This guy was done in Golden High Flows (it's a traditional sized resin)
Also very sorry for an even bigger wall of text ^^; Good luck in your endeavors! I'd love to see some of your customs later :)
