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Airbrushing Yellow


Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies

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I've seen numerous times on Britmodeller and elsewhere that yellow is difficult to work with. Whilst some yellow pigments are less strongly staining that some other colours, the principles of airbrushing yellow are exactly the same as for any other colour. As always, less haste = more speed. Do not use an airbrush like a fire hose and you'll get a superior result faster. To prove the point, I took a few snap shots this afternoon whilst spraying tin lids for a 1 litre batch. One of the tins is already sprayed dark grey having been surplus to a previous batch of something else. The remainder are, as you can see, bare unprimed metal.

 

PXL_20210117_164624040.jpg?v=1610907558

 

Since speed is what I need for this particular task my lid spraying airbrush has a huge 0.7mm needle and nozzle which is completely overkill for virtually all model making purposes. Similarly, the compressor pressure regulator is set at 20psi, which is 5~8psi higher than I usually use for modelling. This doesn't make much difference to what I'm about to say though.

 

The first thing is to not be a miser use a good quality thinner - irrespective of what brand or basic paint chemistry you're using. Tap water is the fool's thinner for water-dispersible acrylics and household white spirit is the fool's thinner of choice for enamels. Use whatever you like for clean-up but for actual airbrushing the thinner is not where you want to save a penny or two per session. As it's bare metal we're working with and I need speed, have a mask for this scale of stuff and extraction, I'm using cellulose thinners. The airbrush jar has a mixture approximately 50/50 thinners to paint.

 

Due to the shape of these lids, I will apply identical methodology as for any other paint. I will spray them from four low-angle directions to coat the inner "verticals" then give a final fifth pass perpendicular to the lid faces. I am trying to apply an even light coat. I do not want full coverage.

 

 

PXL_20210117_164716420.jpg?v=1610907558

 

I'll turn the target 90 degrees and do the same again. I want to give this aspect of the target an equally light coat as the first aspect received. The outer rim will naturally end up more opaque as I do this. I am looking for glossy reflections as I lay this coat down - I want a satin sheen back from the coat as it lands, not a full-wet gloss.

 

PXL_20210117_164729600.jpg?v=1610907557

 

Away I go. Take the same advice that people who believe there is such a thing as a car with too much power get from a hooligan like me - the airbrush needle valve is an analogue thing, and it has infinite positions between Closed and Full Chat. You are allowed to use partial openings!

 

PXL_20210117_164811995.jpg?v=1610907558

 

I repeat this twice more and the lids have had four light passes 90 degrees orientation apart. They now look like this.

PXL_20210117_164953146.jpg?v=1610907559

 

Finally I prop the board up and give them all one final medium-flow pass perpendicular to their faces. They now have full coverage.

PXL_20210117_165053260.jpg?v=1610907558

 

See? It was easy. Slow down. It'll work out much faster. Take it from someone who doesn't have time to mess around and needs tin lids sprayed yellow in 20 minutes from laying the lids on the magnetic strips down to cleaned out airbrush and on to the next colour.

 

PXL_20210117_165633698.jpg?v=1610907556

 

 

 

As a final thought on this, you may be wondering why I am so strongly against laying down enough paint to get full coverage in a single pass. The answer is simple - thick coats take exponentially longer to dry than thin coats. I am applying light translucent coats such that they flash off very rapidly and act as a primer for overcoats. This retains the subsequent paint films where they land giving me the uniformity. If you try to cover in too few passes the excessively thick wet paint film will move under its surface tension and pool in acute angles, giving you a translucent effect anyway on the flat areas but a thick gloopy mess that takes a geological age to dry in the bits where it pools.

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9 minutes ago, Stew Dapple said:

God I've become overwhelmed with nostalgia for your shed :lol: 

 

But a timely reminder for me, as I have some yellow spinner tips in the job queue :) 

 

Cheers,

 

Stew

 

 

 

I was thinking of you this afternoon, whilst singing:

 

"Alll by myyyy sellllllfffffffff,

Don't wanna be,

Alll by myyyy selllllllffffff..."

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Just been airbrushing yellow and as Jamie has said patience is required and a light touch, I was airbrushing onto bare plastic in two places and gave one side a thin coat and switched to the other side, repeat until a decent coverage is achieved.

 

Cheers

 

Dennis

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11 hours ago, spitfire said:

Just been airbrushing yellow and as Jamie has said patience is required and a light touch, I was airbrushing onto bare plastic in two places and gave one side a thin coat and switched to the other side, repeat until a decent coverage is achieved.

 

Cheers

 

Dennis

 

Exactly Dennis. Several thinly laid down coats will start drying much, much faster than one thick coat. It leads to a much better result much quicker overall.

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A timely lesson as I've got the yellow undersides of my Me 163 done  in British captured colours of yellow .Your explanation is very well presented. Thanks for taking the trouble to post it

Cheers

Alistair

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Thanks from me too Jamie, not just for the tutorial but also for your paint.

I've just sprayed the yellow on my Wyvern and it went on very well - as usual :) 

 

(Maybe I did go 'a bit thick' in some places :whistle:)

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57 minutes ago, Kev The Modeller said:

I'm seem to remember reading or seeing, that to achieve good yellow colour the primer/undercoat needs to be white a bit like using black undercoat to achieve good metallic finishes.       

 

A white undercoat can make it easier, but the proof is in the pudding above with 63 bare metal lids and 1 dark grey, and they're all properly covered in yellow in a single short session with no requirement for me to multiply the processing time by messing about with undercoats, drying times in between, double loading and cleanout of the airbrush etc.

 

I'm not advocating against using an undercoat on a model - I realise I'm using tin lids above but that really was the point. Yellow will cover like any paint if the technique is more refined than Mr Bean's :D

 

hqdefault.jpg

 

In short, if I can get full coverage on bare metal and dark grey surfaces in 20 minutes from laying out the tin lids to fully cleaned up, there's no reason anyone airbrushing a model can't achieve good results from a better starting point. :)

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I once used a white undercoat for the wing leading edge yellow stripes on a Spitfire wing, then airbrushed the yellow, however there was a slight ridge on one part so I sanded it back, this revealed the white undercoat and repairs were then necessary, so I have not used an undercoat since.

 

Cheers

 

Dennis

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Fascinating Jamie

 

I always wondered how tin lids were painted.
 

I have experimented with solvents for enamel - what would you recommend? I am pretty comfortable mixing my own from constituents. 
 

BTW your 1930 RAF Sky Blue is great on my Spit Mk 1 (and matches bits of crashed aircraft at the excellent Hawkinge museum.

 

Will

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On 1/18/2021 at 11:03 AM, Scimitar F1 said:

Fascinating Jamie

 

I always wondered how tin lids were painted.
 

I have experimented with solvents for enamel - what would you recommend? I am pretty comfortable mixing my own from constituents. 
 

BTW your 1930 RAF Sky Blue is great on my Spit Mk 1 (and matches bits of crashed aircraft at the excellent Hawkinge museum.

 

Will

 

Hi Will,

 

If you want to mix your own thinners I would begin with naptha, often sold as refined mineral spirits.

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Having read this thread I'm looking forward to my next encounter with yellow paint, having just done two things:

 

1 - brushed enamel gloss yellow on a Yellowjacks Gnat;

2 - bought an airbrush so that I never have to undergo such trauma again.

 

Cheers Jamie,

 

JRK

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