Hi everyone. I’m 51 and just getting back into the hobby of model car building after being away ~35 years. I’ve been lurking here a while and finally decided to post a question. I’m looking forward to being a part of the community.
I’m leaning towards airbrushing acrylics for the majority of my medium to large surface work. I have some Tamiya, Vallejo, and Zero paints on the way. Where airbrushing is impractical, such as smaller pieces or detail work, I plan on using brushes.
Can I use the above mentioned acrylic paints with brushes? If so, any tips or precautions? Or should I just stick with Testor’s enamels (which I can get locally for $1.99) or a similar “brush specific” paint?
I’m not the most knowledgeable in the forums by a long shot but here is my 2 cents. In my experience Vallejo brushes very well with very few brush marks. I have not attempted to brush Tamiya paints but I have heard several others say that it is not very brush friendly. My understanding was that Zero paints are a lacquer and if they are I would think they would be a bit too “hot” for brushing on plastic, but I have not tried it. As always experimenting on something besides your model is the best way to see what works for you. Many modelers like to use cheap plastic spoons to experiment on for airbrushing and hand painting.
Good luck and have fun.
EDIT-for some good comments on brushing lacquers look further down in this forum for the thread titled “Can you brush-paint Alclad metallics?”
Tamiya acrylics can be brushed reasonably well for painting small detail, but they usually need to be thinned and/or retarder added to keep them from skinning over.
That having been said…though I use Tamiya acrylics almost exclusively for my airbrushing…I usually use Testors’ old ‘square bottle’ enamels for most of my small details, as it’s less of a hassle. [:D]
Vallejo covers a wide variety of “sins”. Vallejo Model Air/Game Air come pre-thinned and are airbrush ready. As such the are too thin to effectively hand brush.
Vallejo Model Color/Game Color are better at hand brushing but must be thinned for airbrushing
Add in Vallejo Mecha paints, metallic paints, Fantasy paints, and Panzer Ace paints and you have a wide variety of materials which will require a variety of techniques
You can brush Tamiya acrylics, but they need to be thinned first. And that’s the trick to hand-brushing: thin the paint. Testor’s enamels out of the jar are a little thick, but sometimes that’s an advantage-like painting knobs or buttons on an instrument panel or shift, throttle quadrant, etc. And I use them, especially the gloss enamels, on my toy soldiers, without thinning.
I use a wet palette with water-based acrylics, for brushing by hand. That includes Andrea, Vallejo Model Color, Lifecolor, and craft-store brands. A wet palette consists of an air-tight container, a sponge, and a piece of permeable paper that forms the actual palette. You soak the spone with water, lay the paper over it, it soaks up water, and then you can put blobs of paint on it. The water thins the paint, and you get a nice consistency. A wet palette makes it easy to blend colors, if necessary, and to store a batch of colors from one session to the next.
With Tamiya’s acrylics, I use a small jar of their X-20 acrylic thinner. I’ll either dip my brush in the paint (eg, in the jar lid) and then dip it in the thinner jar, and apply it. Or I use a ceramic palette that I have to mix the paint and thinner, then pick it up with the brush and apply it to the model. I can lay down layers of color as thin as if I airbrushed them.
My go-to for hand brushing is Vallejo Model Color. It has everything I could ask for for hand-brushing;
Lays down thick so it usually covers in one coat, is opaque, self-levels and shrinks upon drying so it retains (and sometimes even enhances) details. No brush marks, so long as reasonalble technique is used. (keep the brush wet, don’t let the paint sit too long and start to dry. That’s about it)
Take a second look at Ed Grune’s post above, Ed did a good job of explaining which Vallejo lines work for hand brushing and which do not.
Used to use all Testors enamels ( well Pactra too back in the day) but these days its a combo of some Tamiya acrylic but mostly lt’s craft paints. Gotta have everything primed but I do that anyway. I thin the craft paint with either water or usually my home brew thinner to where the brush loads well but the paint flows well too. Works great, no brush marks and as long as the parts are primed no problem sticking. I use some Vallejo Model Air in the air brush but never have ventured into Model Color for brushing. If I didn’t have nearly 100 colors of craft and artist acrylics ( another good option) I’d probably go down the MC route. But the craft paints do fine for me and they’re dry in minutes not days, not that I’m in any rush but you don’t even have to wonder where to set them down to dry,shoot a hair dryer over them and they’re enough to set down anywhere…
Yeah, regarding Vallejo, do be aware that their Model Color paint is made for brushing by hand. It was very popular among figure painters, before it became popular among scale modelers. Model Color was the second big brand of water-based acrylics, next to Andrea. Vallejo’s Model Air paint is formulated for airbrushing. That’s not to say it can’t be applied by hand-I have some bottles of it, myself-but it might not behave ideally without some of the additional products from the Model Air line.