A few months back I bought a copy of Chris Ellis’ book, How To Go Plastic Modelling, published in London in 1968 by Patrick Stephens Limited. What got me to dive back into it over the last few days was that old bugbear of mine: airbrushes. Spraying inside the house is a nonstarter, so spray painting is limited to a few good weather months when it can be done outside. It seems like an expensive tool whose use to me is limited, but it also seems to be a table stakes item if you want to be a serious model maker. I saw a notice for a video over at Boomer Dioramas called, Why Should Every Modeler Learn to Use The Airbrush? , and happened to be reading the brush painting posts over at The Brushpainter, so I thought I jump into a few old books to see if they had anything to say on the need for an airbrush back in days gone by. I started with Ellis’ classic.
Most books of this sort begin with a list of tools you’ll need. Here’s his list of ‘Essential Tools’:
Craft knife
Spare blades
Assorted pin drills
Razor saw
Plastic-handled screwdriver
Half-round file
Emery boards
Assorted glasspaper
Tweezers
Steel ruler
Pin chuck
Ellis also has a list of ‘Luxury Tools’:
A small vice
Carpenter’s D-clamp
Minidrill
Weller soldering gun
Weller soldering iron
Pliers
He notes too that many common household tools can come in handy for model work.
Interestingly, there are no painting tools in either list. Both are focused on construction. It isn’t until the Painting and Finishing chapter that he lists a few, and those are brushes because the chapter assumes brush painting is what’s going to be done. Ellis recommends going to an art supply store and buying the following brushes from a known maker of quality artist brushes like Reeves, Rowney, or Windsor & Newton:
#00 and #1 rounds
#2 chisel-edge
The chapter concludes with some musings on using spray cans and airbrushes. Regarding brush painting versus spray painting from cans:
Thus far I’ve barely mentioned spray painting. But go to any hobby shop and you’ll see tempting counters loaded with the stuff in aerosol cans. Frankly, I would say that the average modeller scarcely ever needs to use it. For a 1:72 scale aircraft the quantity of paint you need is small, the areas to be painted are precisely defined, and there’s lots of detail painting to be done anyway.
Which seems to suggest that small scale models, without broad, flat areas, are just fine for brush painting. These days, for example, if you take a look at a few videos over at Quick Kits, you’ll see that’s just what some people still do.
It isn’t until the chapter's last paragraph that Ellis talks about airbrushing:
Air-brushes are, frankly, so esoteric that I would be surprised if one reader in a thousand has ever used one, or maybe even heard of one. These are very fine spray guns looking rather like a fountain pen and used in intricate painting processes such as photograph retouching. You need such accessories as a compressor and much else besides and if you got an air-brush outfit complete for as like as £15 you’d have a bargain. An air-brush expert would hardly have bothered to read this chapter at all, and unless you are very rich or work with air-brushes as a matter of course, I would say that its use for painting models is largely academic. There are several well-known modellers who use air-brushes, and they generally carry off lots of the prizes at model competitions as well. There is certainly no more realistic way of reproducing a spray-on finish than an airbrush, and I envy those who are wealthy enough and skilled enough to use them. But for the average plastic modeller, air-brushes are something to think of if you ever come into a fortune or become a professional modeller. Meanwhile, like everyone else, I get no nearer to an air-brush than drooling over some of the beautiful air-brush finishes I see at IPMS model exhibitions and competitions!
I was hoping he’d say something like airbrushing was just plain no good given my desire for confirmation bias :-) But no, the paragraph is something of a wistful sigh that the majority of us will need to get by with brushes as best we can until we either win the lottery or professional circumstances provide us with an airbrush. That’s not the situation today. They are far from esoteric, but it still is true you’ll need one to be competition ready. In 1968 the writing was on the wall for brush painted models.
John Allen, of Gorre & Daphetid fame, did not use an airbrush. At least that's the legend...whether he may have in his life as an artist I can't say. Still, he preferred the basic brush for painting his locomotives and rolling stock.
ReplyDeleteI'd guess that the lacquer based paints of the period, particularly Floquil, had something to do with his success. They had a reputation for going on smoothly and leaving no brush marks if adequately thinned, and they could be thinned without too much loss of coverage.
As someone who uses almost exclusively acrylic paints, I find these harder to thin to a similar consistency but not impossible. Key is using a binder medium in the thinner instead of straight water. It is also hard to fight the impulse to go back over areas I've already applied color to rather than letting the first thin coat dry before applying a second. I find the former creates brush strokes, the latter a better finish.
While I do own airbrushes, both single and double action, I reserve them for use in places where their advantage is great and outweighs the work of setting up before and cleaning them after. Liquitex makes an airbrush thinner for acrylics, but I find windshield washer fluid works VERY well!
Thanks for that. As I've looked on the internet for instructions about making acceptable trees, more often than not, there will be step where an airbrush is required. I then need to judge whether brush work can be substituted, or if something else can be done to get the same effect, or if the step can be skipped without overly changing the final appearance, or if the instructions need to be abandoned in favour of some other method. So far I've found either using a brush or skipping the step is fine. But, I sense in most of these tree building procedures, the availability of an airbrush is assumed, so it's used without a second thought.
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