Airbrush Instruction

[Jess Adducci]

Hey folks! New to the group and Louisville. Would you all have any recommendations for someone to teach me airbrush basics? Paint mixing, equipment basics, and beginner techniques? I've had an airbrush for awhile now and just can't seem to move forward with it.

[Greg Miller]

I took a class at Preston Art Center many years ago and can't recommend
it enough if you're serious enough about it to put in quite a bit of
time. While I doubt the same guy is still teaching there, I have taken
other classes there and they've all been quite accomplished in their
field and are good teachers. Even the owner is quite an accomplished
airbrush artist. In the end I gave up on airbrush, it requires an
incredible amount of practice to get good at. Make one mistake and
you've essentially trashed your piece, usually the only way to recover
is to start over. But when I was trying, I found the class to be very
helpful, as well as many artists on YouTube.

[Greg Miller]

Just looked at their class schedule, doesn't look like they have a real
airbrush class anymore, but they do have an airbrush workshop. Not sure
what the difference is, but it's obviously not as long as the class was,
so you might want to call and ask.

[Brian Wagner]

If that falls through then youtube is your friend.  I am sure there are videos on airbrush techniques.  Then, when you figure it all out, come teach a workshop at LVL1.  I would like to learn!

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "LVL1 - Louisville's Hackerspace" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lvl1+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Jess Adducci]

I looked up the Preston workshop. Looks like a pretty good idea for intro instruction.

I've looked on YouTube before and they just don't cover with enough depth the stuff I'm confused about like paint mixing.

But I'm also only using the airbrush for prop painting at this point. Not crazy awesome art. 😊

I'll definitely be willing to share anything I learn though!

[Greg Miller]

Mixing colors is truly an art form, you'll mostly only learn from experimenting.  It's helpful to make a color chart with all of the pigments you have like the one below.  You put all of your pigments across the top and left side, then mix every combination 50/50 in a table format.  Since the table is symmetric along the diagonal, most people will mix either 50% black or white with one side or the other (in the example below they used white).

I haven't ever found much info on mixing colors, and it wasn't for a lack of trying.  Best I ever came across was a lecture I attended by a guy from Gamblin.  A couple of things I remember, he said his primary pallet was just 5 colors he knew how to mix well, everything else he used sparingly.  Another tidbit was that the colors are the most saturated straight from the tube, mixing colors will only produce less saturated colors.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/6f/30/4e/6f304e66ee76a45fd311e51a153a22c4.jpg