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This is my workshop. You can see that
I keep my brushes and paint in the shelves in the upper right
corner and that I use lots of paper towel, newspaper, and plastic
wrap. A can of lacquer thinner is at the back of the bench
and I use this to clean my airbrush at the end of the day.
Lacquer thinner is inexpensive and dissolves most paint
quickly. I soak my airbrush in it for about five minutes
then disassemble it to clean the parts. |
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This is the airbrush I use. It is a Badger
Crescendo 175 bottom feed double action, internal mix air
brush. The output from my compressor is set to about 30
pounds pressure. After using the
airbrush to paint a color I run blue automotive window washing fluid
through the brush to clean it. This fluid is inexpensive and
does an excellent job of removing the old paint. |
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These are the model pieces after they have been
cleaned, sanded, primed and set on toothpicks. The box in the background is
the original shipping container for the model. I use super
glue to attach the toothpicks to the model pieces. The
toothpicks can occasionally detach from the model pieces during
work, but they are easy to glue back on. |
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This is one of the legs after being painted with
flesh tone paint. Base coating is performed by holding the
airbrush about four or five inches away from the piece while
lightly spraying. Move the airbrush continuously so that
many
light coats are applied. Do not put the paint on too
thick so that it looks wet and runs. I always apply a second base
coat the next day. The second coat cleans up any thin spots
and prevents any of the the underneath color from showing through. |
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This is the sailor top after being painted with two
coats of a
mauve pearlescent ink paint. For Sailor Saturn I wanted a peal
finish to provide a deep resonance and reflectivity to the
costume. I used a set of paints from Daler-Rowney
that were excellent. |
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This is the body after it has been painted with a
white pearlescent ink paint. The Daler-Rowney paints were
quite thin so I used them directly from the bottle. However,
I found that they required extra pressure to pass them through
the airbrush and that the brush could threaten to stop
spraying. I was using the normal size airbrush tip and should have used the large tip for easier spraying. |
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This is the body after being masked with paper towel
and plastic wrap. If I remember correctly this picture was
taken after the flesh tone had been sprayed around
the collar. |
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Here is the body after the flesh color has been
painted and the masking material has been
removed. Precise edges were not critical as the sailor top
will be placed over the shoulders and will hide any edge problems. |
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This is the body after the detailed items were
hand painted. I tediously applied a single drop
of chrome paint to each of the dots around the arms and on the
base of the piece. However, there were some painting errors. You can see a spot of gold at the bottom of the right stripe and
two areas just above the breasts where the gold color ran outside
the lines, on each side. |
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Here is the body after the painting problems were
fixed. The faults were touched up with white pearlescent paint and
a brush. The pearlescent paint was excellent for covering
faults and filling small imperfections. |
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