How to Paint Everything: Getting Started With Airbrushing – The Basics

Making it easy to apply smooth color transitions to a model is one of the best advantages an airbrush has to offer. The effect we’re going to showcase here is a very basic fade, which will then be followed by painting the rest of the model traditionally. Framing airbrush effects with detail done with a brush is a great technique that goes quite quickly and can be quite striking on the tabletop, while helping avoid the more traditional “airbrushed look”. I am going to use a wizard, but this could work well on anything with a large flowing area you want to apply a fade to, such as nighthaunts, robes, capes on Space Marine captains, etc. — Just change out the colors as needed.

Here’s our wizard after the first steps. To do this, first spray the entire wizard with a dark red(VGA Gory Red). Once the entire model is red, come in with an orange (VGC Orange Fire), starting to spray off of the edge of the model and moving along the edge of the area you want to be orange, gradually going back and forth to build up the effect until you’re happy with the amount of orange present. Then, I repeated the process with a yellow (Golden High Flow Acrylics Hansa Yellow Medium. Any nice pure yellow will work, I used this for convenience), spraying along the edge of the fade and moving upwards, but much less far this time, only catching the very edges.

Here the wizard is after I did a little bit of brush painting. I reinforced the trim on his sleeves with the orange color and edge highlighted with yellow. At this point, as I started to get a better idea of how the final colors would look, I decided that I hadn’t been aggressive enough with the yellow and wanted to blend in the edge highlights a bit more. As I haven’t painted much along the edges, this isn’t too big of a problem. If you’re careful, you can go back in and modify your airbrush work even when you’ve done a bit of work on the model.

I went back in with my airbrush yellow, repeating the previous process to work more yellow into my fade. I then touched up the bits of the sword and skin that had gotten caught in the crossfire of the airbrush, and continued my brushwork.

Now paint the rest of the owl. Nothing particularly special, and I mostly used the opportunity to play around a bit. I’ll include a reference for the other parts of the model at the end of this segment.

The idea of laying down an airbrush effect, then coming in and working around (or over) it is the basis of a lot of airbrush work. Without too much modification, you can apply a similar technique to things like fur, patterns on horses, large areas of skin, gradients on armor plates, or anything else your mind can come up with. Just play around and have fun learning and experimenting!

Paints Rundown:

• Skin: VGC Pale Flesh washed with Guilliman Flesh thinned with Lahmian Medium, extreme highlights with VMC Pale Sand (Less successful on this old metal model than on newer plastics)
• Boots: VMC Black Highlighted with Skavenblight Dinge, then Skavenblight dinge mixed with Jokaero Orange, then dots of Jokaero orange
• Staff: Gorthor Brown washed with watered down VMA Burnt Umber
• Pouches: VMA Burnt Umber highlighted with Gorthor Brown
• Skulls: Filthy Brown highlighted with VMC Pale Sand, recesses reinforced with very watered down VMA Burnt Umber
• Beard: VMC Black highlighted with Skavenblight Dinge
• Gold: VGC Hammered copper, dotted with Retributor Armor in highlights
• Steel: Vallejo Mecha Air Dark Steel, dotted with Vallejo Mecha Air Steel to highlight.

Zenithal priming is another great way to achieve striking effects quickly with an airbrush. With zenithal priming, rather than priming our model with a single uniform coat, we instead use several shades for the primer coat, with lighter colors sprayed from the direction of the “light source” we’re going to apply to the model’s paint (this is typically from above the model, so the lightest points will also be the highest points, or zenith, of the model). Once we’ve laid out a primer coat in this way we can apply a single thin layer of paint over it that will naturally reflect the colors of the undercoat, creating visually striking but subtle effects that improve the model’s appearance.

In this example from How to Paint Everything: T’au, Alfredo talks about his approach to painting Farsight Enclaves Fire Warriors.

T’au infantry are relatively simple in that they don’t have a ton of materials, so you get large blocks of color. But you also get a lot of edges. My goal for this scheme was to maximize contrast on the red armor so that Joe would be easily readable at a distance. That said, I also didn’t want to go with a complicated scheme so hopefully you’ll find this approach relatively simple but striking.

1. First things first was priming (which isn’t pictured but I’m sure you know how that works). I went with a black/grey/white zenithal prime using my airbrush. The plan here was to give me enough initial contrast so that I could then spray a single base color and still get a nice gradient effect. To achieve this I airbrushed Scale75 Blood Red which makes for a great baseline red in my opinion. I thinned it 4:2:2:1 with water, flow improver and airbrush thinner and sprayed it in several thin layers to get a nice basecoat that takes advantage of the zenithal underneath. The contrast is much less obvious when you first spray the model and everything is the same color but it comes to life as you paint more. To push the contrast further, before moving on to the remaining basecoats, I thinned green ink heavily (8:1) and sprayed it from below to push the shadows towards green and have them contrast with the red armour.
2. Like I said, there’s not a ton of materials on your typical T’au infantry so the remaining basecoats were fairly simple. For all the cloth I used a 1:1 mix of Black and Vallejo Dark Sea Blue. This is a green-ish dark blue (not unlike Incubi Darkness) and again helped me push the contrast with the red. For the sept color I went with Vallejo’s Dark Sea Grey which is a cold grey with some green tones (do you see the theme here yet?). Other than that I used a nice bright gold for the thankfully limited metal bits and a neutral near-black for the rifle. For the skin, I wanted something reasonably saturated and found that Vallejo Azure was the perfect color to serve as a base for T’au skin. Like any skin, feel free to vary this across your army and create some tonal variations (I can’t imagine all T’au are exactly the same color).
3. As is usually the case, I gloss coated the miniature and then use a black enamel wash to pin wash everything. T’au have lots of panel lines and so pin washes work really really well to create visual distinction. Just take your time with this and erase any mistakes with thinner, it’s pretty simple thankfully.
4. Finally, edge highlights. There’s a lot of these on the armour and they take a while, so buckle up. For the armour, I highlighted using an ochre, which is my preferred method usually instead of an orange or pink. I specifically used Vallejo Brown Ochre and also used that as my first drybrush on the base (which helps tie the model and the base together). The cloth was highlighted by mixing in some Sunny Skintone to Dark Sea Blue in order to add some yellow tones and brighten it up. The rest is pretty straightforward, neutral grey for the weapon, a lighter grey for the sept color and highlights for the gold. For the skin, you want to have something actually skin-like to highlight with. You can use an actual light skin color (like kislev) or mix it in with whatever you base was. In my case I have a lot of fantasy/alien skin colors and I used Scale Fantasy’s Braineater Azure to highlight. It’s blue but also skin-like so works great. The final step was to once again spray the entire mini from below with thinned green ink to push the contrast further. I think it worked quite nicely and you end up with some really good tonal variation that is readable at a distance. The actual last step (after matte varnishing) was to paint a bright silver on the eye lenses (and the glowy bits on the back) and then cover with Tamiya Clear. You could use green for the eye lenses for maximum contrast but I’ve usually seen yellow in the codexes so I went with that and it looks good. I gloss coat the lenses afterwards and all finished.

And the final result: