I work as a airbrush artist at Busch Gardens in Williamsburg VA. We mostly spray on textiles, such as tshirts, hats, mousepads, and such. I am begining to get into custom automotive painting on the side though. Is there a certain feild of airbrushing you were looking at getting into, illustrative, t-shirt, automotive? Some of the demands very from field to field is why I ask. As far as online tutorials go, they seem to be few and far between. For some reason airbrushing tech seems to be a well guarded secret. There are few books out there that aren't much good either. Most seem to be rather old and don't overly get into actual techniques. There are a couple of magazine on the subject which can be decent. Airbrush action is one and it seems to be devoted more towards automotive and Tshirt airbrushing while the other is Airbrush art + action which seems a little more towards the illustrative side. I also think that it may be originaly a german publication that is translated into english. These however again do not overly get into the basic principles of airbrushing. They do sell a lot of airbrush how to videos in the airbrush action magazine covering a large variety of uses for the airbrush which I haven't seen but appear to be rather informative and i have heard some good things about them through the grapevine. some of the basics of airbrushing that you might want to start focusing on are: Playing with different air pressures from the compressor. For a majority of things we do at the park we run at about 65 psi. This is somewhat high &ometimes for more detailed work I will turn it down to around 25 or so. So try different levels for different things and see what you like. Also, is your airbrush a single action or dual action? Single is that you just push down on the trigger and paint come out with no variance while dual action allows you to push down on the trigger for air and pull back to control paint flow. A dual action is prefered for anything past say model painting or so and is sometimes even prefered for that. It just gives a lot more control. Now, asuming you have a dual action one of the big strengths of an airbrush is the extreme variance of lines it allows. From very fine to nice and thick with a single pass. The ways to vary these lines are by vrying the amount of paint that is being sprayed(more paint thicker line) and by varying the distance of the airbrush to the object being sprayed( further away thicker line) So this is a big thing to experiment with. One thing that alot of people will not do unless told is to keep you finger down on the trigger. Keep air the air flowing even when your not pulling back for paint when your working on the surface. Constantly letting off the trigger creates this start stop kinda thing and you lose any "smoothness" your airbrushing will have. Once again I will reiterate how important line variance is. Having the same thickness of line through and image is boring and does not interest the eye. However having a good variance will make it stand out. One drill to help you with going thick to thin and the reverse is to practice tapered lines. I've also heard them refered to as "rat tails". They are done by starting air flow and and holding the airbrush 5-6"'s away from the surface and pulling back rather far on the trigger to start a good flow of paint and start letting the trigger go back forward reducing paint flow as you hand passes horizontaly, verticaly, or diagonaly and gets closer to the surface being painted.This should be a quick motion. You can also reverse these steps to do a thin to thick line. Well, there's plenty more stuff to tell but I let you tell me if you want more before I continue. Just email me
[email protected] , im me elroyj25 , send me a private message from here, or just post a response here. As for the name you did. It's quite clean. Your fill in looks good alot of people tend to be blotchy at first. It'll take some practice but try and do all of it using only the airbrush (fill, outline, and highlights).I dont have much of my own stuff on my computer but here's a couple.
