AIR BRUSH POWER!!!!

Hello demons and demonettes, it's been two week since Adepticon and I have done nothing but play with the shiny toys I got while up there. For those of you who dont know and were not able to go to Adepticon, Badger (the airbrush company) had a booth up at Adepticon and was selling their products at a ridiculous markdown, all sales were cash only and they were not giving out receipts (FORSHADOWING!!!!)  So most of the people bought one as well as me. So this week and last I decided to bust out the air brush and give it a try (after watching about 5 hours worth of video on how to use them). I decided to start with a Razorback for two reasons: 1) I needed to paint one and 2) it seemed to be the easiest to paint.

I started off by spraying a base coat of white just to get used to the gun and the compressor and which setting to use if I wanted a wide spray or a fine pinpoint spray. Which I have to say there is a lot more that goes into the setting then I thought. After the base coat was done I wanted to try out the shading tech that all the videos i saw kept talking about(see pic below).

At this point I had plans to stop and wait until I had more practice before I continued painting (which lasted all of 5 second) until I started mixing paint to put the silver down. I used a 1 to 1 mix of boltgun metal (yeah I know its not boltgun metal anymore so sue me) and water. I decided the mix was right when it seemed to be the same consitancy as the pre mixed airbrush paint I bought in the store.

Here's where it all went to h***. After about 5 min of using the silver my compressor stop working!! I spent 3-4 days trying to get help from badger to get this problem resolved, to which I was told they would not help me because I did not have a receipt (see told yeah). So after 4 days of trying to get approval to get it fixed I got impatient and fixed it myself (it turned out to be a bad bolt, if you need help fixing yours, send me an email). The next day, I did find out the the VP of engineering had been off for an emergincey, and was more then happy to fix it oops. So I finished up my base coat of silver.

At this point I had two different options, I would use masking tape to block off the areas I was painting next or try to be really careful and not color out side the line. With my track record, I chose masking tape and used "Tamiya Masking Tape", which is amazing. It has enough sticky to stay on the model but would not pull off any paint after I pulled it off. This process took me about 5 min and another 5 to paint the red.

From here all I had to do was paint on a few details and I was done. Start to finish the whole process took less then 20 min to paint the tank (if you don't count repairs, mixing and me playing around with the air brush). I have lots of plans to keep using my brush and cant wait to try it on different projects.