Hi guys,
I’m set to paint some 1/144 EA-6B Prowlers and I didn’t think they were large enough to warrent breaking out the airbrush. What do most people do to get a good layer of hand-brushed paint on their models? Would you thin it with a touch of thinner so it’s not so thick? What’s the consensus?
Thank you,
Eric
Although I don’t explicitly thin the paint as I do when air brushing, when hand brushing I will keep thinner handy and dip my brush in it periodically as needed so that the paint is flows nicely.
Thank you Abarne,
I gather by the lack of responses that hardly anyone handbrushes anymore.
Eric
I do, I do.
And I (now*) do what Abarne said. A paint mixing tray with a drop or two of thinners and every 5/6 brush loads (depending on the paint) re-dip the brush in the thinners before re-loading the brush. Check that it hasn’t over-thinned then apply nice clean brush strokes - it’s almost as if the enamel paint wants to get off the brush and lie flat! Sometimes there are a paints that thin too much in this way, so it can be a try it and see what happens on a handy sheet of styrene.
I’m still not getting airbrush quality finishes, but I’ve got about 1/10th the brush marks I used to get and the ability to let the thinned paint flow into awkward corners and crevices takes a lot of hard work out of the process. If I were even remotely thinking of showing the finished models to anyone other then my better half I’d probably try to get into airbrushing, but the overhead of cleaning and preparation puts me off.
now* being quite recent - was it a FSM article I read about a month ago on brush painting, or maybe in another modelling magazine. It showed how to flow paint around tyre (tire) rims - one of those cut-out-and-keep articles that change the way I model.
Thanks for the great tip, OhOh! (Love the name too, by the way. Hopefully it’s not what’s heard frequently when you model.)
I’m going to try your method tonight. After reading your post it reminded me that I read an article once in FSM which utilized the same technique.
As far as tire painting or related articles, I’m not sure if that was in FSM, at least not recently anyway. Personally I just take a brush with a very long and fine brush head. It pulls up a fair amount of paint and then I just spot touch the brush where the rim and the tire meets. Capilary action does the rest with some additional mild coaxing on my part. So far I haven’t buggered up too many tires that way.
Thank you again for your advice!
Eric
Just passing on what came my way. The OhOh is actually from my hockey number 00 pronounced OhOh 
The difference you’ll find is that the thinner really helps the paint flow - much improved capilary action, much less mild coaxing.
I should point out that the effect can be very dependent on the paint you’re using.
I was painting with a Humbrol grey (40 gloss) last night which needed no further thinning. I find most yellows don’t react well to thinning. but Humbrol 119 leaves brush marks unless I dip-thin as I’m going. (Oh and any metallics that tend to seperate out are a problem as the thinner just increases the speed at which seperation occurs.)
If I’m starting with a paint colour or manufacturer that I’ve not used recently it’s out with the scrap styrene sheet and 2 or three minutes experimentation before I get near the model.
Enjoy, hope it goes well for you.
OhOh
OhOh
I thin my lighter colors (whites, yellows, light blues etc) with laquer thinner. Seems to make the paint flow better (less streaking) and the colors seem to be more intense.
This a little trick that I learned along the way for brush painting metallics,. Do not buy the standard metallic paints for brushing, but buy the metallic paints that are prethinned for airbrushing, then carefully brush it on with a wide brush, “I use a size 1 shader” add your first coat then wait a minute and add a second coat. Once you are good at doing this you get a quick metal finish that actually looks air brushed. Model masters have a good line of prethinned metallics that covers most of their line of brushing metallics. I find that this technique is especially useful for exhaust nozzles, and anodized tail spaces, because these parts are small and are hard to realistically weather when air brushing, I also use it when painting the gun barrels for jets, because the thinner paint flowes around features beter.
Aroguy
Thanks qmeister I’ll give that a go - its the streaking that I can’t seem to get rid of. That is, unless I put down sufficient paint to obliterate any surface detail!
OhOh
Sounds like a good approach - I’ll give it a go, next time I’ve got the metallics out.
One thing I had been doing was using a base coat with a very matt finish, then putting very thinned metallics over the top of this in very thin coats - 4 or 5 to gradually build-up the colour. The matt finish seemed to stop the metallic pigments “pooling” - I’m guessing the surface on the matt finish was sufficiently rough to trap the pigments. (Unfortunately I haven’t had sufficient spare time to figure out which colour matt base coats work with which metal colours - as you can probably guess the base coat does affect the metal colour - doh! The only times I still do this is with matt black under silver and a matt red under bronze.)
OhOh
I’ve noticed the same qualities with the Model Master line of metalizers. They brush really well and that’s how I do all my jet exhausts and radial engines that way.
Thanks again for all the feed-back!
Eric