Airbrush Noob: The First Project

by | Mar 26, 2012

Still very definitely not my work!
It's been a couple of week now since I got my airbrush all set up. I went and bought myself a couple of Dark Eldar vehicles - a Venom and Razorwing - as subjects to practice on.

I'm now on the verge of having the Razorwing finished, here's how it went...





I got myself set up, having glued and trimmed and tidied the model. I decided to keep it in three main pieces though - upper and lower hulls and the tail fin. I did this as I wanted access to the pilot further down the line.

I started off with a coat of Vallejo Model Air (VMA) Dark Sea Blue (I decided I didn't want them all to be black quite early on) on the whole hull but left the wing and nose panels black as they'd be a contrast colour.

This was my first ever use of any airbrush and I got it right reasonably quickly, but not before having made a mistake and ending up with a slight rough patch under a wing (where no one can see thankfully).

First ever base coat!
Usual messy work area, note handy beer!
I'd seen this paint job by Les Bursely and, though I'm not a fan of the white for D.E I really loved the wing pattern. So I had a little play around and soon cam up with a slightly simplified version, like this:


Experiment complete I masked off the wings (remember this, I'll come back to it) and applied the pattern with VMA Light Sea Blue. Here's how it came out:


Now, while I'm pretty happy with the effect, I thought it was maybe a little light. My girlfriend then came over and asked why had I painted bubbles on it? Hmmm.... Bubbles. Doesn't really suggest most evil race in the galaxy does it? 

Now, remember I mentioned taking note that I only masked the wings? Well, lesson learned. It only shows a little bit above but you can see overspray on the second picture, between the engine bulge and the rune-y thing. Damn. Lesson learned indeed. 

I now had to re-spray not just the wing edges but the fuselage too to cover up the sloppyness. 

Once it was back to dark blue I thought about colours. Red was my first choice but I promised myslef no red in this army as, frankly, I'm sick of it! So I turned to the colour of real men - pink!

I also masked it off properly:


It's worth pointing out that masking tape will pull some paint off your model if you stick it straight on. I stuck this on my trousers a few times first so it'd pick up some fluff and lose some of its sticky, it worked a treat.

The above picture is a little extreme, this was for the last stage - the gold trim (VMA Copper) and the almost finished result looks a little like this:


I'd love to know what you all think so feel free to comment or make any suggestions or pass on tips. I'm hoping to finish it and the Venom on Thursday when I'm finally off work!