a pursuit of fruitless endeavors and endless refinements

A Tale Of Two Chests

After a few false starts with my new airbrush, I finally had everything ready to go and was going to use a production-style process to finish up a batch of Frostgrave treasure chests. I picked up a water trap (thanks Russ!) and figured out the correct fittings for everything so it was time to set up the paint area.

I picked up a small spray booth as well to keep the mess and overspray to a minimum. It set up fairly quickly and then it was off to the races. I have my crappy craft brown paint and I thinned it with distilled water to a very thin consistency and put a little bit in the cup and sprayed away.

Unfortunately, it seemed a bit too thin as the paint went on in a runny mess. I added more paint to thicken it up slightly and it worked a little better but was going through the paint very quickly. This seemed at odds with what I’d read and researched in that airbrushes are pretty efficient at laying down paint. This should have been my first sign that maybe something wasn’t right but after adding more drops of paint in the cup to finish up my third treasure chest the airbrush just stopped putting paint out. All I got was a bunch of air and no paint no matter what I did.

After an hour of troubleshooting with a friend, I resigned that I must have done something wrong and would need to take it all apart and clean/find the issue. I started with the front and after some trial and error, saw that some of my acrylic had dried or gotten stuck and that seemed to be the culprit. I flushed as much of the bad paint out of the system as I could but by that time I was running late for a paint meet up and had to leave it alone.

Even though it was thinner than I thought, I liked the smooth layer of paint it laid down and so I’ll have to mess with it a bit more to figure out what to do next. Likely, I need to check the needle size and make sure that is actuating properly (as it seemed to not do what my friend’s airbrush was doing). Also I’ll grab some acrylic thinner to see if that corrects the consistency issue with the paint or just grab actual airbrush paint to make sure that isn’t a lasting issue. The chest on the right is the airbrushed one, btw.

I went to my paint meet up and finished off our set of Frostgrave treasure chests. They were done simply and will work fine for our general treasure needs. After the worrisome failings of my airbrush adventure, it was nice to chill out to a movie (Walberg’s Shooter), eat, drink, and paint merrily.

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2 Comments

  1. Russ Spears

    Don’t be me and forget to actually EMPTY the water trap 🙂

    I too had “paint in the cup, but only air i coming out of the tip”. Turned out I needed to clean the trigger better than I had been – it was gunking up my process.

    • Christian

      I’m wondering how much I’ll need to empty that trap, at least this winter. It is dry up hear most of the year so we’ll see how much condensation builds up.

      Looks like I just jammed a bunch of crap into the nozzle and it got clogged with my paint that wasn’t thin enough. I switch needle sizes to the larger option in my kit and went with my airbrush primer that doesn’t need thinning. It seemed to work fine except I was priming black on a black model and couldn’t tell where I was actually painting 😀

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