Thread: Airbrush reccomendations?

Thats a good Badger. I have been plenty satisfied with my Badger Krome. If I ever replaced it, it might be with a Patriot. I also use an ancient Badger 150 for most of my priming and coating. I like to change out the air-cap for one without the prongs. You'll need to be careful as nothing is left to protect the needle end - use your storage cap when not painting, or place the airbrush into your stand by the back end.

Some advice. Get some good airbrush paint made for minis. I have had much luck with the Vallejo model air, and I just received my Game Air paints, which I will be cracking into soon. You can mix down regular mini paints, but every single paint is different and it take a while to get comfortable with the variable results. IMO the Badger paints are crap. The transparent line are worse that the opaques.

If you are going to buy a compressor....and you should....get one with a tank. Skip the tank-less ones! If you are using a badger airbrush, Badger makes a hose with an inline filter - I recommend this as well.

Learn to make your own thinner. You will use a ton of it and it will get expensive. Its easy. I can get into that later if you want. I use a method very similar to this. The ingredients are alcohol, flow aid, drying retarder, and water. Get 90%+ alcohol. W&N and Liquitex both make a flow aid (surfactant). And everybody under the sun makes a liquid drying retarder (make sure you get a liquid one, most are).

Get yourself some good tools for cleaning and maintenance. This includes, a couple of irrigation bottles (one for thinner, one for alcohol/cleaner), a tip cleaner, a set of miniature bottle-brushes. A decent respirator mask - I got mine at Home-Depot. Something to hold your airbrush while its not in hand - I use an airbrush cleaning station. Lots of paper towels, some toothpicks, and some cotton swabs (Tamiya makes some smaller denser ones that come in real handy).

Couple other things. Some 3M masking tape (blue) and one or two sizes of Tamiya masking tape (Hobby town sells it), and some liquid mask - I think Vallejo's is best It comes in three bottle sizes, but you wont need much. Humbrol and a few other make some as well. The thinner stuff is better than the thicker stuff on figures. You can see Angel Giraldez using it in some of these pics.

EDIT: NOW WITH LINKS!