Well that’s got your attention 😉 And this post is about is airbrushes rather than ink…
Gravity fed-airbrushes are lovely pieces of kit, very efficient on paint and able to spray at very low pressures. Now one thing that you must always do is to thin your paint down to the consistency of semi-skimmed milk. This ensures that it flows through the brush smoothly. One of the problems with this is that you generally can’t mix up your paint in a regular palette as you’ll make an awful mess when pouring it in. I have heard of people actually mixing it in the main cup of the airbrush but that sounds like a recipe for disaster as whatever you put into the cup first will just run into the internal mixing chamber.
Some time ago I did a bit of research on the internet and managed to locate a supplier for small 3.5ml flip-top paint pots as I commented in a previous post, which worked out to be about 8p each. I’ve been using this type of pot for about 3 years now and very quickly realised that although the flip top allows you to seal the paint you’ve mixed, it still does dry out (there is only a little paint in there) and if you’re using a foundation paint the paint actually separates. The end result is that a pot is generally only used once or twice before being thrown away.
Well I’d recently got to the point where I have a dozen or so pots left so decided to see if there was anything more suitable for mixing my paints up in. I brought to mind having a tattoo last year, the tattooist used a small plastic ‘top’ to put her ink in, which got thrown at the end of the session. A bit of research on the internet revealed that you can actually purchase these for about 2p each – and that’s at the most expensive (buying more than 100 brings the price down). They come in 4 sizes – small, medium, large and extra-large. I picked up 100 small and 100 large for a fiver, including P&P. I will be honest and say that the small ones are pretty small – probably only 1ml in total, however the large are a decent size and comparable to the 3.5ml pots I’ve got. In future I’ll likely only buy medium and large but this means a cheap and economic way of mixing paint for the airbrush – just make sure that you blue tac or double tape them to a surface as they’re really easy to knock over!
I seem to have hit a bit of a ‘bloggers block’ recently, so have decided to write about the couple of Space Wolves Dreadnoughts that I’m currently kit bashing. I think this must be the forth attempt to write this post over the past couple of weeks as my earlier attempts were just creating posts that were as dull as dishwater!
