Franc Kaiser
Air-Valve Autobot!
As of this month, I am entering my 5 year anniversary with this medium… yay! 
It has been a thrilling ride, my love for airbrushing has gotten deeper by the minute, and I don’t see an end of this love affair in sight yet. I thought that now would be a good time to reflect what I learned in all this time, and maybe this would be helpful for our dear airbrushing community to reflect on it as well.
Please mind that I am not teaching anybody or it should be understood as my way of indoctrinating anybody; it’s simply my own notes to myself, reflecting on what works for me and what helps me to push forward. The first and the last two tips I find essential.
It has been a thrilling ride, my love for airbrushing has gotten deeper by the minute, and I don’t see an end of this love affair in sight yet. I thought that now would be a good time to reflect what I learned in all this time, and maybe this would be helpful for our dear airbrushing community to reflect on it as well.Please mind that I am not teaching anybody or it should be understood as my way of indoctrinating anybody; it’s simply my own notes to myself, reflecting on what works for me and what helps me to push forward. The first and the last two tips I find essential.
- Less is more. The more I progress, the less paint I apply on the substrate. Previously I pumped all the ink in the chamber onto the substrate, no matter what. Now I probably get through the same painting with half or less volume of paint. I realized that it normally only requires one light pass to achieve what you want, not 3 or 4 repeated passes. It is important to apply constraint, and not simply plaster some area because you can. This will also help to mitigate the old problem of “going too dark”.
- Do the background first. When an object is in the foreground of a “complicated” background, then it may be easier to tackle the background first and leave the foreground object once the background is firmly established. I don’t always follow this rule, but it is one of the first questions I am asking myself when deciding how to paint something – background first or foreground first. Typically, if the background has lighter values than the foreground, it is safe to do the background first, as darker colors will cover the background in an easier way. If the background is dark and the foreground object is light, then I go the other way round, but then I make sure the foreground object is masked well before laying in the background.
- Give the paint time to breathe and dry. Acrylics is such a forgiving type of paint, and seemingly you can move on within minutes, adding further layers. I found that this is not always true. After blocking in a solid background, I tend to give it time to dry overnight. This way, it will be really dry and solid the next day and subsequent erasing into new layers will not drill into the first layer.
- Masking isn’t cheating. In my earlier years, I always considered the application of masking, friskets, stencils etc. as “cheating”. When doing fine art, many people have this attitude and they are very high-brow… they don’t want to be in the same mold as motorcycle pinstripers. That’s all false pride, really. Many contemporary artists (also, outside the airbrush realm) use masking tape and all kinds of tools to create hard lines, straight lines, and to avoid coverage of objects by color. Some people think it takes way too long to cut out a frisket or tape everything up as they want to paint, not do some pedestrian work first. You may get away with it when painting animals and organic objects, but so far I don’t see any other way to recreate the feel of technical objects without the use of some sort of taping or frisking tools. I still get the a subconscious feeling of guilt when removing the tape around a painted spaceship these days, but again, the artist’s biggest critic is himself.
- Avoiding overspray. When applying a stencil, I make sure it is right on the substrate. In the past I applied paper with some scotch tape underneath, but then the edges are still not all way down and risk overspray areas. The best way is of course some masking film or film frisket but I don’t have that tool. I am cutting out the object (a negative stencil) and cut little triangle holes around the object, which are then covered with tape. I do triangles because they’re easy to cut with the knife.
- Use white sparingly. Ok, so we all know the unwanted blueshift of an opaque color such as white over a darker area – there is a lot written here in this form about it, and how to mitigate it. Nevertheless, I love to use white, but I try to limit it as much as possible… less because of blueshift (which can be actually a desired cool effect) but because the painting gets inevitably grainy which each pass. The best option is to avoid white paint altogether by either not painting bright areas (leave them “blank”) or to use erasers to remove the paint from it. It is better to go “light to dark” in any case – this approach lends itself best to airbrushing.
