Okay, I know airbrushing is a valid technique in painting but for minis?
Yes, also for painting minis.
I'm not slamming airbrushers here, but I feel that airbrushing a mini (aside from a primer) is cheating
So you actually *are* slamming airbrushers. If I'd gave you my airbrush, wanna bet that the results would be horrible instead of great? I have taken years to only understand how to mix the colours correctly for mini painting, although then I've done only vehicles. But trust me, I had a lot of unsymmetrical stuff with splattered colour instead of a nice blend. You can see many airbrushed pictures in the gallery that I find horrible, because they've been done without skill. That these still get rated high, well, that is more cheating imo.
Having said that, I'm new enough to the hobby that I can admit that I'm probably not looking at the whole picture. So.... what are the pros and cons of airbrushing?
Pro:
- You can make large areas fast
- There won't be any large brush stroke patterns in the result
- You can do very fine blends
Contra:
- You can mess up an entire model faster
- You have to mask other areas very often, because the colour flows with air anywhere you might not want it. Masking can be a real horror!
- If you don't have perfect control over your airbrush, you don't get thin lines and your surface that should have received a blend will more look like camouflage than anything else. Means it isn't a nice blend, but blobs of colours.
Like that:
http://img607.imageshack.us/img607/7043/22267087.jpg
- If you don't have perfect control over your airbrush, you will load one area with a blob of fluid colour and then make it run all over your model because of the air pressure the airbrush outputs.
Similar to that:
http://img299.imageshack.us/img299/7277/37112855.jpg
- Blends with an airbrush will never look the same like a blend with a brush. Well, they can, but nobody will probably do that afford. An airbrush blend with a colour that is very different to the underlying one will always look "placed over" it. To make it look the same you have to use a lot of intermediate mixed colours which takes incredible much time for cleaning the airbrush, mixing the colour, etc, etc.
What I mean with "placed over" can be seen well here:
http://www.coolminiornot.com/264225 No offence, but that guy seems to be relatively new. All that is airbrush and you can see it from a distance. What really makes me dislike him is that he said he did quite some blending while that probably was or at least can be done in a few minutes with an airbrush.
- Cleaning up. Seriously, cleaning an airbrush is a horror and if you don't cleanse the important areas of all colour, then you will get into troubles spraying. Acrylics dry fast, giving it a retarder isn't a better idea either (for me at least). So if you leave a tiny bit of colour in the nozzle, the next run can dry in there much faster than with having it cleaned perfectly, although you will still receive the same problem a few minutes later. If that happens, then the paint starts to splatter and might not want to flow out of the airbrush at all, which may lead you to opening the channel a bit more which results in a large blob of suddenly running colour. And you have to clean the needle and nozzle quite often with acrylics unless you like that "no colour or blob"-game.
- Because of the way an airbrush puts colour on a surface, it makes a difference if you put blue over black or black over blue (or any other colours, the order is important). So once you have sprayed too much colour at one area, you have messed it up. You can't simply go over with the base colour, as that will give an entirely different look. Blending with a brush is easier to fix in that parts, because the colours actually do get mixed. You might run into similar problems when doing juicing though. Still a brush has much better control over where you want the colour to be, since you touch the surface. With airbrush you always have to guess where it will go to.
Do 'Eavy Metal painters do airbrushing? Do YOU do airbrushing?
Yes. Although 'Eavy Metal is using it only for vehicles (I've seen it on some super heavies and the new DE vehicles for sure). I'm also using it on 28mm miniatures, but I can tell you that this is not easy and will require a huge time masking and still a very large amount of time to adjust some parts of blends and work out the details. Simply airbrushing won't speed up the process that much either. Some minis are also easier to airbrush than others. Marines for example are easier imo (large flat areas, minis often come in parts), Eldar are a harder already (fixed metal poses with lots of overlapping items, arms/legs or armour plates).
PS:
Sorry for the photoshop examples of what may happen with an airbrush, but it's 8am and I don't feel like making a demonstration shot (also it's too dark outside to photograph it). If you wish though, I can make a picture of these issues for real. They are surely horrible if they happen and they will happen often in the first years of airbrushing. And if they do, the model (or at least the part you're working at) is entirely ruined.
