So you’ve mastered brush painting (or at least done it enough to get bored of basecoating). Now what? Well, the shiny new toy for the skilled brushpainter who has everything is obviously an airbrush! Or, for that matter, anyone that needs to make perfect gradients, mass basecoats, smooth varnishes of anything not in a rattlecan, or do an indoor priming session – an airbrush is the ideal solution to all of them. If you’re more of a mixed-hobby enthusiast, airbrushes can also do stencils, makeup, and edible paintings – it’s a shockingly versatile tool.

Here’s what I use:

• The new hotness at my place is the NEO For Iwata, a dual-action gravity feed internal mix brush (and yes, those words all mean quite a lot for this type of tool!). It’s a mid-range brush that is shy of professional quality but well better than the typical beginner model. For its quality range it’s quite cheap, but that’s still about $75 depending on where you get it. The dual action allows for smooth on-the-fly changes to paint flow rate, the gravity feed lets it operate at lower pressure (a must for smaller/quieter compressors), and the internal mix chamber gives a smooth flow of just about anything you put through it.
• My starter airbrush was the Badger 250, which I seem to recall cost about $25 or so, and the difference in quality between it and the NEO is staggering. Due to its siphon feed, it requires much higher pressure – up to 50 PSI for thicker fluids! – and to get anything to flow through you have to keep the jar fairly full, which uses quite a lot of paint. The single-action trigger doesn’t allow flow control, so it doesn’t handle changes in thickness well and has no means of changing spray pattern, which also means you have to keep the brush pretty far from your piece and use a lot of paint to get smooth coverage. The external mix isn’t really a problem and can actually make cleaning easier, but it does leave the brush prone to a different set of issues than an internal mix brush. Overall, it’s not what I’d recommend for anyone serious about airbrushing, but for occasional use on larger projects and practice for beginners it’s actually not too terrible given that you know what you’re getting into.
• I use a Testors Blue Mini-Compressor for all my airbrushing. This compressor isn’t anything too amazing, but it meets my needs and I was able to get it at a significant discount (it was mislabeled to be about 85% off at Michael’s and the cashier and manager I worked with were gracious enough to try very hard to honor that even though I’m sure it was a significant loss for the store – that’s why I still shop there even though I understand their prices aren’t the best). If I hadn’t had that opportunity when I started out I probably would have gotten a hardware-store-type compressor for somewhere in the $20-$40 range and outfitted it with a flow rate valve and pressure gauge, then converted the hose down to something my airbrush could connect to. But on the other hand, if I decide to upgrade from here I think I’d go with an actual mid- to high-end hobby compressor because they’re much quieter and lower profile, which is a better fit for working in my apartment.
• On hoses: the Badger 250 required a proprietary fitting since it’s got a slightly weird connector, but the NEO uses a standard hose fitting straight off the shelf. In that case I grabbed a snazzy lime green third-party hose whose brand I genuinely forget but which works just fine.
• To regulate airflow, I picked up an inline MAC valve for the NEO since some fluids need to flow differently (the main example of this is topcoats, which typically should go on at lower pressure and closer to the model than the actual paint). I would have preferred to get a regulator that has a gauge on it since with this valve I have to just choose pressure by feel, but those are freakishly expensive for what they actually are and do, or aren’t precise enough for low-pressure usage.
• For ventilation, I use a generic lighted spray booth that as far as I can tell is identical to at least a dozen others by various companies. This device is a serious game-changer for indoor spraying. The reason I finally invested in this was that I spent the better part of a day spraying orange paint before realizing that my lungs and throat had started to seriously hurt, which ended up lasting most of the following week – and later I discovered that my PC fan grate was coated in the stuff. After seeing that and realizing that’s what I was breathing I decided to get myself set up with something to save my lungs. As pretty as my minis are I don’t want my insides to look like that thank you very much. The lighting is helpful but not necessary – I just like having my workspace bright enough to see what I’m doing, and it was on a good enough sale that I could afford it at the time.
• I keep a Vallejo cleaning pot at the ready both to hold my airbrush when I’m not actively using it during a paint session and to run cleaner through it between colors and after completion. The water in there gets to be some crazy colors, as expected, but it sure beats shooting that stuff into the air. Any cleaning pot should do for this, including some 3D-printable ones I’ve seen, but I bought this one in particular out of brand loyalty more than any actual feature.
• Paints are thick, and airbrushes do not care for thick fluids. Vallejo airbrush thinner is my preferred way around that problem; most paints seem to do well with a 1:1 mix of paint to thinner, though depending on the application and the specific paint you might want more or less than that. Vallejo’s Extra Opaque colors, for example, require very little pigment for full coverage and can be mixed up to 1:4 without losing any opacity at all. Play with the ratio and learn for yourself how much thinner works best for your paint and your airbrush.
• Much like thick paints and airbrushes, models do not like paints with high surface tension. Vallejo airbrush flow improver neatly removes this problem without any other additives like Windex or soap, and is chemically compatible with their thinner and paints. Just add a little of this (or whatever other brand-appropriate product) to any paint you put through your airbrush – maybe about 10:1 paint to flow improver – and the surface will self-level once it’s on your piece to a nice smooth, even coat.
• Iwata airbrushes are, according to my pre-purchase research, somewhat fiddly about cleaning process compared to other brands – not that they’re harder to clean but that they’re more picky about how you do it. The Iwata-Medea airbrush cleaning kit is their in-house solution to that question, and so far it’s left little to be desired. The standout inclusion is a pair of dental-style cleaning brushes that are far finer than the typical pipe cleaner and can fit through the airbrush’s small fittings and holes, then pull the paint back out.
• The cleaning kit includes some already, but I use quite a lot of Iwata-Medea airbrush cleaner in my painting. I don’t usually keep distilled water near my workspace, which is probably a mistake, but because of that I tend to run this cleaning fluid through my brush not only at the beginning of the cleaning process to loosen things up but on every cleaning pass – there’s nothing wrong with this approach, but it does burn through the stuff really fast. If you could turn the airbrush inside-out you could get away with using far less of it, but then again if you could do that you wouldn’t need to run cleaner through it in the first place. This stuff is a must; so far I haven’t sprayed anything through my brush that this can’t loosen up enough to get it out of its innards.

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