Tips for airbrushing acrylic inks ?

Tools, Techniques, and Reference Materials Painting and airbrushing
1

Hi,

I would like to use acrylic inks to weather airplanes. I am not talking about using them as a wash in panel lines, but I would like to airbrush them in very fine coats to model smoke stains etc.

I bought a few bottles of Dr Martin Spectralite ink, which
apparently gets good grades from airbrush artists.
After some experimentations, I found that they should not
be thinned with alcohol, only with water. If thinned with alcohol,
they give a very chalky finish (probably they dry too fast on the model). Thinned with water the finish is better, but I am still not so happy.

Does anybody has some experience with this technique?

many thanks in advance for any help,

Christian.

2

Please forgive my ignorance, but:

  1. It seems as if inks (by definition) have to be fairly thin already. Have you tried airbrushing without thinning to see if it will go through the brush?
  2. Throwing #1 out, and using the water-as-thinner technique, experience has shown that water as a thinner by itself can cause beading of the paint, instead of a nice even coating. The solution (at least for acrylic paints) is to add a tiny drop of dishwashing liquid to break up the surface tension properties of water.
    Gip Winecoff
3

thanks for your answer (sorry for the delay, I do’nt visit the forum so often. Yes inks are very thin and can be airbrushed straight from the bottle. The point is that while thin,
they are also very opaque and cover a lot. It seems that one needs to thin them a lot to
get translucent coats.

best,

Christian.

4

Just picked up a couple of bottles of acrylic ink on clearance at Michael’s. Can I airbrush the stuff as a model car body color? Corvette C8 in Fluorescent blue!

Also, is cleanup same as regular acrylic paint?

5

This is a topic that I’ve been wondering about. So far I’ve only hand brushed the acrylic ink as a wash or as a glaze but I’ve been interested in airbrushing it. I’ll definitely follow along with this topic.

6

This was a big disappointment! The ink is too thin to produce a nice opaque coat and was very uneven on the plastic spoons I used. Bummer!

7

mrg149, do you mind me asking, what did you thin the inks with?

8

Inks are a strange animal, being extremely dense in color but still generally transparent. Keep messing with them, though, as they can make some very neat effects. Particularly for glowing/hot effects, like are often seen on wargaming miniatures – you paint a bright white basecoat and then that ultra-intense ink color goes over the top.

Here’s an example: CLASSIC PLASMA from elminiaturista on YouTube

9

Toimi_Tom, I’m working on the old Lindberg Nantucket Light Ship currently and was wondering how to make the search/fog light look like they’re on. Do you think inks(yellow or orange) could give me that effect?

10

Tom, yes, it definitely could. BUT.

The effect that you’d be going for is called “OSL” or “Object Source Lighting” which is a technique for “casting” artificial light across parts of the model. It can be achieved using almost any medium, from regular acrylic paints to oils to inks. Inks, when used with an airbrush, do offer a quick and easy way to get the gradients almost perfect.

OSL can be very striking. Here’s a video that outlines the concepts using drybrushing to get the effect : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4hRwWe0WNs

There’s going to be a problem using OSL on a traditional scale model, however. A convincing OSL effect requires that the rest of the model be extra dark so that the glowing light stands out. Otherwise it just makes the “lit” area look washed out.

And since on our scale models we’re generally using the model’s shape to cast natural, real shadows, rather than artificially adding them like one does on a wargaming miniature, artificially adding light probably won’t look right in context, unless you radically darken the rest of the project.

So you could definitely do this. I can picture it being very awesome: A nighttime diorama of your lightship, where the primary “illumination” was the warm search/fog lights casting OSL onto the ship from above, following the inverse square rule and getting darker the further from the lights it gets; and then transitioning slowly to very dark tones with some cool blueish star/moonlight highlights in the shadowy areas.

Here’s a great read on what I’m struggling to describe, and I grabbed an image of a Victoria Lamb’s famous “The Rescue of Sister Joan” that, while over 25 years old now, is still an amazing application of the technique:

However, this would be getting pretty far outside “traditional” scale modeling, and heavily into a more artistic interpretation of the ship, and the focus of the project would be on the lighting rather than the ship itself.

I’d love to see it done, though. :grin:

11

Thank you so much Toimi_Tom! That “Rescue of Sister Joan” is exactly the effect that I’m looking for. You’ve given me a lot to think about.