In this post I will look at a few painting brands I have tried out through my airbrush and my thoughts on them. Before I bought my airbrush I was mainly using Citadel Paints and Vallejo Game Color paints to paint my miniatures with. I first tried Citadel Paints in my airbrush. These are quite a pain when it comes to airbrushing. I love the paints but they are designed for brush work only and it’s very obvious in the pigment thickness and the pots that they come in. The thickness of the pigments, even in the base paints isn’t a major issue as you can of course and should thin them down anyway but the pots are a stumbling block for me. I’ve found it quite a chore to take paint from the pots to my airbrush cup. I mainly use an old brush to do this and a lot of the paint gets wasted as it just sticks to the brush.
The Vallejo paints on the other hand are thinner and come in dropper bottles which I think is the number one thing to look for when finding paints for your airbrush as it makes life so much easier. The Vallejo Game Colors still require thinning down, but not as much as the Citadel Paints. The Colors match up pretty well to the Citadel range and with my Space Marine bikes that I’m currently working on I did switch my base colour from the Citadel paint I was using to a Vallejo and the difference is hardly noticeable.
Vallejo also have a range called Model Air. These are paints designed specifically for air brush use. I have a small selection of colours from this range that I have tried out. They work pretty much the same as the regular Vallejo colours but need no thinning at all. Because they are so thin however, I recommend giving each one a good shake before use.
Whilst all these ranges are perfectly fine for airbrushing miniatures with I still wanted to try out another line of paints that are specially designed for airbrush use. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Badger’s Minitaire line of paints, especially their Ghost Tints (which I’ll look at in a separate post). Currently they have some special offer sets on their website where each paint works out to cost roughly £2.90 each. This may sound expensive at first but each bottle contains 30ml of paint which compared to Vallejo’s 17ml and Citadel’s 12ml pots actually make them really good value for money. I’ve now used these a few times and I’ve found the coverage to be really good. Like the Model Air they do not require thinning although I have found myself using a little bit on occasions just to get a nice thin coat when needed.
In my next post I will be look specifically into the Ghost Tints from the Minitaire line and some of the cool effects I’ve managed to pull off with them.