Airbrushing Base Colour - A Question

[RuneBrush]

Just a bit of curiosity more than anything. I've decided to use my airbrush to basecoat my Space Wolves so that I can hopefully get them painted as, I've recently had a few offers of people wanting to game (which I've not actually done for probably 4 or 5 years)...

What I am curious about, is what other painters who do this for there relevant mini's do: do you re-undercoat the 'other' areas (e.g. faces), do you mask them off before airbrushing, do you cover them in the base colour and work off that? Also what people think the pro's & con's are for what other people do

pete

 

[airhead]

SM heads are not attached when you start?
If helmets, base coat them as well.
If bare heads/faces, don't glue them on til after or just paint around the face.

A bit of overspray will not hurt the details that much. If it does, you are putting on way too much paint. Personally, I'd get some colored automotive primer in a rattle can and start from there. (Halfords? in the UK)

 

[Einion]

...do you mask [faces] off before airbrushing...

You could do that, especially if you have a liquid mask. I would probably go that way if I were airbrushing these but it would depend a bit on the sculpts.

If you want to save yourself a bit of extra time, I would also suggest this:
basecoat in a darker shade;
spray over that, generally from above, in your midtone;
overspray that directly from overhead (the mini's top) in a highlight colour.

For gaming, that might actually give you a shaded result you could live with without any further work. But it's reasonably easy to use this as a basis for a more full-on paintjob if you wanted to go further.

Einion

 

[RuneBrush]

Sorry for the late reply. Most of the heads have already been glued on as I'm likely to be gaming with the mini's before I get them all painted and although most people are quite tolerant about having mini's without backpacks or paint on them, models missing heads tend to look a bit naff I'll likely go with a darker base coat and possibly a highlight with the airbrush, I'm not that great on highlighting with my airbrush yet, but have some tanks I can practice on.

cheers!

pete