how to properly reduce my paint.

S

Supa86

Guest
Hello,
I am pretty new to airbrushing and have been painting on paper with createx water based paint was wanted to know how to tell if I reduced the paint too much or not enough.
 
Hi supa86, if the paint is too thick, it won't come out of the gun well, if at all, it could spit or skip and you may have to pull the trigger way back, losing fine control, or use a high pressure to get any flow. If it is too thin...well that's trickier. You can over reduce your paint (put a much higher ratio of water/reducer to paint) and still be able to use it fine. The pigment will be very reduced, so you will have to make more passes to get the colour you want, and you will need to be very careful with your trigger as it is very easy to let too much paint out at once and get spidering. But, if you have that contol, and keep the brush moving (which you should do anyway) it shouldn't be a problem. Working on paper, you may find that you are just making the paper too wet if you are having to do more passes on the same spot to build up colour, so less reducer would be good in that case. The best way is to start with with what comes out of the bottle, and then add your water/reducer drop by drop, until you get a good clean flow, and make a note of what you did, and what airpressure you had, and be aware that different colours don't always work the same.
 
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And always use a reducer they recomend for reducing paint's. In your case this is createx w100 or auto air 4011 reducer.
 
Supa86...It can be hard at times to give exact reduction rates as it really relies on a lot of factors such as The type of gun, the type of paint, the pressures you like spraying at, whether its opaque or transparent so on and on.. A good guide I find is to reduce your paint to a consistency of milk, strain it, set your pressure to suit your surface or needs and then add a touch more reducer/water until it starts spraying just right..It is a hard thing at times to quantify as many have different prefrences...
 
Thanks everyone for your input I believe I may have been reducing paint to much I was trying to do a light source in the eye of an eagle with opaque white and it spider on me even when I thought air pressure was to much I turned it down a bit and still spidered on me!
 
I use autoair and i reduce my opaques with tranparent base and it never spiders.You should try that. when you do your highlights
 
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