First airbrush

Playing is a great way to get use to the equipment and get a good feel for things. There is no magic recipe regarding paint/psi/reducer so the more time you get with trying to dial it in the quicker you will find your own base line.
The beauty of the createx paints is that you can reduce with water - I'd only suggest this while you are learning and only on absorbent substrate, its no good at all on hard surfaces.

with your photography skills I would suggest you have a good eye for what looks right, which will come in handy for shadows, lay outs/composition etc. The exercises that we all suggest are helpful in getting to know where the paint starts and ends and building muscle memory from the repetition involved but diving in the deep end and just painting something is also a great way to build both muscle memory and your knowledge bank.

Regarding ''Paint would spray pretty consistent for a spell, but then would thicken as time went on causing me to thin it out again." -
Either backflush regularly or don't load to much paint in the cup, settling/seperating of the paint can occur. So your nicely mixed paint sprayed nice, then the pigment started to sink and caused it to thicken at the bottom of the cup, which made it harder to spray - some colours are worse for it than others.

You've got the right mental attitude to succeed, you realise it will take time but in the meantime you are going to have fun with it.
there is maybe a handful of people here that airbrush as their income, the vast majority are hobbyists who do it because they enjoy it and its a creative outlet. we have modellers/gamers, lure painters, crafters, woodworkers all who use an airbrush

well enough of my rant lol you are doing well, you are getting a feel for it and that is the important thing at the moment. I did the same thing and within half an hour of faffing around I knew this was something I wanted to know more about. !


Thanks for the advice, I was filling the paint cup to full. I thought getting paint all over my finger was a right of passage.... Makes sense now that you spelled that out. I've been painting on construction paper as it's cheap... once I get a little better I have some water color pads I'll try to paint on. I'm also using water color due to the easy clean up... I like to keep things as simple as possible.
 
Glad you are making progress! Something you can look forward to is once you figure out the stuff you are dealing with right now, things get easier. Then you can just work on practice and technique. It's more fun from that point on. Not that you ever stop learning, as paints are constantly evolving, but at least you will have a better sense of how to deal with issues you run into.

Keep plugging away!
 
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