Age of Armies - Month 1: Helldrake - DONE!

Khorne Helldrake - DONE!

It's the end of the first month of 40K Global's Age of Armies Campaign and I'm pleased to say that I completed my commitment to paint a Helldrake and I got my first experience with an airbrush. I've already posted about the technique I used to paint the Helldrake (here) so I thought that I'd give you my first impressions on using the airbrush to accompany the pictures of the finished product.

Quick Tips

There are a couple of tricks which you're not going to be able to get from any research you do before buying an airbrush. Firstly, correctly thinning your paint is not easy and takes a little while to get right ... and then you need to change colours and you have to thin the next one! I will say that I've found the Vallejo Air paints are about the right consistency straight out of the bottle but they do tend to dry fairly quickly in the brush. This causes clogs and will have you cleaning the brush a bit more often than you probably want. Thinning the paint with a drop of water mixed with "Flow Release" 9/1 seems to solve the problem nicely.

Secondly before you blow trigger air through the brush you absolutely must spary onto scrap paper otherwise you'll blow whatever residue is left in the nozzle or on the needle all over your model. I've done this in a few places on the Helldrake and it's bugs the hell out of me!

Give it a Blow

On the whole I really like using the airbrush, it's far more precise a tool than I thought it would be but it also takes exactly as much practice to use well as I thought it would. As such I'm expecting that my next attempt at a Helldrake (a few months down the line) will look noticeably better than this one.

If you're on the fence about getting one I would say that if you do a reasonable amount of painting, and can afford to, it's worth giving it a go. Once you see the results you can get you'll want to use it on as much as you can. I know I do. I'll be painting up two Khorne Bezerker units and a lord on a Juggernaught next month and I'll be using my airbrush at least for base colouring and applying some basic shadows and highlights.