What makes a good airbrush paint? Well the most important factor for us is that it flows smoothly. A combination of finer pigments and a good reducer allow us to achieve that. Smooth paint flow means less tip dry, better colour transition and the ability to work finer detail. Other factors to consider are paint coverage and durability. Whether you chose, water based or solvents, these are the main characteristics you should be looking for.
The two most popular paint categories used in the industry are solvent and water based acrylics. Once you’ve decided on which type of paint you will be using, think about what you will be painting on. For example there are paints that have been specifically designed for automotive, other paints are more suitable for clothing, illustration etc. Then there are paints that are generic and suitable for most surfaces. Like the airbrush, if you chose a good one in the beginning, it will make your journey an easy one.
There’s a lot of paint on the market today and when I started airbrushing, I probably bought every type of paint available back then, another unnecessary waste of expenditure. Luckily today we have the internet and forums, so we can ask for paint related advice.
Water Based Paints
There are a handful of companies that make quality airbrush water based paints that we have used in the past. They are Aero Pro, Golden, FW inks, Com art and Holbein. A recent kid on the block is the Createx Illustration range, we use it as our paint of choice when we are teaching students. It’s a nice paint to work with and has an incredible pallet selection. Plus it can be used as an illustration paint or for custom painting. These paints aren’t cheap but even a small bottle will go a long way, unless you are painting extremely large surfaces.
Most airbrush paints come ready to use which simplifies the paint process. We would recommend that you also buy the reducer that comes with the paint. It’s useful when you are doing very fine detail. Do a simple comparison test with their reducer, other manufacturers reducer and also try simple distilled water to see if it makes any difference to the paint flow. Also try a sample of different manufacturers paints to see which one performs best for you and stick with it. It may seem a pain testing different paints and mixing with various reducers, but it will save a lot of hassle and money in the long run.
White usually presents a problem when spraying with the airbrush, you will likely find that out of all the colours, white gives the most tip dry (Build up on the tip of the needle) and doesn’t flow as well as others. The reason is that white has a heavy pigmentation. So when you want to test a paint, we would suggest that you try the white in that range. If it flows smoothly with a nice coverage then it’s a good indicator that the rest of the colour range will be the same.
Solvent paints
The paint that we use in our work happens to fall into the category of solvents, after years of struggling to get a paint to meet our criteria for detailing, we developed our own range called professional Airbrush Colours. It meets all the criteria mentioned previously. In general, solvents have an advantage over water based paints and in our business we use it to our advantage, we are able to produce more work at a faster rate. The reason being that the paint dries much quicker, less airbrush cleaning time, less tip dry and we can achieve better detailing and control. These little differences make our lives much.
If you are a custom painter, and love all those incredible rich colours, candies and pearls, there are a number of specialist paint manufacturers around. Probably the biggest and most popular is House of Kolor. If you are thinking about trying these colours but are a bit uncertain, then I would suggest you buy yourself the ‘House of Kolor, kolor guide.’ Shown below.
It contains actual hand painted colour chips so you can hold hold it to the light to see the amazing effects that can be achieved. You can create hundreds and hundreds of colour variations from their range of paints and products.
A page from the HOK Kolor guide. You can already see a sample of the amazing colours to chose from.
Another industry that uses specialised paints similar to the custom painting industry is the Beauty industry. There’s not much difference between the auto paint colours and paint colours used to paint nails.
If you are an airbrusher painting motor cycles, cars, crash helmets etc. And know very little about custom paints, pearls, candies, metal flake and special effects paints then I would suggest you learn as much as you can to give yourself an edge and enrich your repertoire.
Still Confused?
It’s understandable, with so many paints on the market and new paints coming out every year, it becomes a minefield. To add to the confusion, everybody seems to have contradictory opinions about which paint is best. What i would do is find a reasonably priced supplier with a good range of different manufacturers paints, and ask for a white from each of the manufacturers range, as mentioned previously, white is heavily pigmented so is the most problematic colour. That should be a good indicator of the quality of the rest of the paint range.