Air brush recommendation please.

[racm32]

I want to branch out and start using an air brush but have no experience with them. I'd like some recommendations for a good quality air brush that is beginner friendly. Also any tutorials would be helpful.

[Connectamabob]

Iwata HP-CS in the US, Harder & Steenbeck Evolution in the UK or Europe.

You can go cheaper, naturally, but you get what you pay for. Cheap AB are a QC gamble, and aren't the best for beginners, as they tend to require more fuss and maintenance, and vary so wildly in quality that it can easily throw a beginner who doesn't yet know enough to tell when something they're experiencing is a skill problem vs. a tool problem. A more experienced user can do fine, but a beginner needs something that "just works" so they can work on their skill without worrying about the tool.

The Iwata Eclipse series is the lowest I would personally recommend: they're tanky, simple, and they "just work". And when I say "lowest", that's not a statement of quality. Eclipses aren't "low end" quality: they're very flexible workhorses that even advanced illustration ABers like to keep around. Their design makes them easier to maintain for a beginner, particularly the nozzle setup, and Iwata holds fit and finish to a higher standard than many other companies, which makes cleaning easier. The CS model is the gravity-feed cup. What kind of cup/feed you want is half what kind of work you're intending to do, and half personal preference. I like side-feeds myself, but gravity feed keeps things super-simple, which is good for a beginner.

Harder & Steenbeck are a German company, and by all accounts live up to the "German engineering" stereotype. Their brushes have probably the best nozzle design out there from an ease of maintenance perspective, and their fit and finish is high-quality. The "Evolution" line is roughly the same tier as the Eclipse line for Iwata, however H&S like to maintain a lot of part -interchangeability between lines, so it's easy to get an Evo, and upgrade it to a higher model just by buying a few parts.

If you live in the US, then an Eclipse will give you the best beginner brush for your money, and if you live in the UK/Europe, an Evolution. The difference is simply down to how regional distribution effects relative cost: H&S is much cheaper in Europe than in the US, and Iwata is much cheaper in the US than in Europe.

Avoid Paasche. They used to be good back in like the 80's, but they're little better than the Chinese stuff these days, and are coasting on their former rep.

Badger performs well (equal or better than Iwata in terms of spray characteristics), but fit and finish is rough compared to other companies, so they don't clean and maintain as easily, and there is more unit-to-unit variation in quality. They also do a lot of subcontracting for other companies, so there's a bunch of brands out there that are really just rebadged badgers (Thayer & Chandler, Sata, to name a couple). Their stuff runs cheaper than Iwata in the US, so it might be worth it, depending on your confidence level. Their "Renegade" product line is their equivalent tier to Iwata's Eclipse and H&S's Evolution lines.

Olympus may be worth a gander:
http://olympos-airbrush.ocnk.net/
Iwata started as an offshoot from Olympus. Olympus airbrushes are now OOP, but are still regarded as high quality. The link above is the current owner of the company liquidating new old stock, and is he the only verified legit vendor. I don't have any Olympus brushes myself, but from all I've heard/read, they are in the same quality range as Iwata, if not better in some cases, and they have a high incidence of part compatibility with Iwata brushes. This could make them a pretty good deal, as they are priced a bit less than their Iwata equivelents.

In terms of sites:
This is a good site that shows detailed part breakdowns of many models:
https://sites.google.com/site/donsairbrushtips/home

Here's probably my favorite AB forum:
http://www.airbrushforum.org/

My favorite vendor in the US is these guys:
www.coastairbrush.com
They have fantastic CS. They also offer refurbished classroom brushes, which is a good way to get an HP-Cs for relatively cheap (my Eclipse is one of these so i can vouch for them).

I don't know that much about Europe vendors, but I know these ones are good, at least:
http://www.foxystudio.com/
Like Coast, great CS. If you've got cash coming out your ears, they make probably the single most high-end airbrush in existence (the K-33 Micron, which is a highly modded Iwata CM-SB).

For disclosure, these are the brushes I own:
Iwata HP-CS: my favorite of my airbrushes. So easy to use you hardly have to think about it.
Iwata HP-TH: great for big jobs and undercoating/priming. Expensive though. Surpringly, the easiest of my brushes to clean, and has the best atomization of all my brushes.
Badger SOTAR: I have two, a gravity feed and a side feed. These are great for fiddly detail, but not for general coverage. They have better atomization and trigger response curve than the Eclipse, but are fussier to clean, more skill-intensive in terms of paint mixing/thinning, and not as mechanically smooth in operation.
Paasche VL: Looks nice, has smooth operation, atomizes horribly, can't do lines finer than a crayon, needles bend if you breath on them, and has lots of "gotcha" nooks & crannies that make cleaning a chore. Haven't touched it in years, not since I got my Eclipse.
Paasche H: Same as above, mostly. Atomizes even worse than the VL, but is slightly easier to clean, though not as easy as my Iwatas. Again, haven't touched it since I first got my Eclipse years ago.

[Connectamabob]

OTHER STUFF YOU WILL NEED:

Compressor:
If you don't care about noise, literally anything will do, as long as it's got a tank or a long hose to buffer out the pulses. If you do care about noise, get one of the little cheap Chinese airbrush compressors to start with (may or may not last, but it'll work, and quality isn't as critical as with the AB itself). You can get crazy/expensive with this, but you don't need to.

Regulator:
The ones that come with compressors tend to be poor for ABing (even the ones that come with AB compressors). Instead of looking at regulators marketed specifically for ABing, I recommend going on Amazon, and looking through regulators in the "industrial and scientific" category. Look for regulators that are marked for 0-60 psi instead of the common 0-120 psi, as these will give you better control in the range that's actually useful for ABing.

Hose:
I highly recommend the lightweight poly hoses (like this or this) over the standard rubber or braided hoses. The weight makes a huge ergonomic difference.

Moisture trap:
A regular hardware store model will do. What's important is where you put it: between the regulator and the AB hose. You always want the moisture trap to be the last thing in line before the AB. Whether or not you need one of those wee ones that attaches directly to the AB depends on how humid your climate is, or what kind of hose you're using. If you're using a long and/or coiled hose, it might be good, but if your hose is short and straight, you don't need one. I don't like having bulky junk hanging off the bottom of my brush, so IMO it's better to double up or get a beefier trap to go before the hose. YMMV, as some people like a pistol grip as opposed to a pen grip.

Pipettes/droppers:
Useful for both loading and mixing paint, and for cleaning. Get a big box of disposables ones.

Filter/strainer media:
To get lumps or dried flakes out of your paint before running it through the brush, where it they might clog things up. Lots of people use nylon pantyhose material for this, but you can get actual paint filters for just as cheap.

Soft toothbrush:
Wet with thinner, and use a few quick swipes now and again to clear tip-dry on the fly while working.

Inter-dental brushes:
For cleaning the smaller passages inside your brush. Just get disposable ones at the local 99c store or whatever, as long as the wire core isn't too big or sharp. Don't use pipe cleaners for this, as they shed fibers, and you don't want that inside your brush.

Chap stick:
To use as thread sealant on the nozzle assembly. Not always necessary, but it can help.

Round wood toothpicks:
Whittle to a fine point and dip/soak in thinner to clean the inside of nozzles without scratching or flaring them.

A magnifier or jewelers loupe in the 60x-70x magnification range:
For inspecting your nozzles and needle tips if you suspect damage or stuck on crud.

Painter's dust mask and eye protection:
Just basic safety, yah?

An airbrush stand:
Seems like an "extra", rather than a "need" but you'll quickly find otherwise.

Cleaning pot:
So you don't fill your local air with vapors while spray flushing. Buy one or DIY one, it doesn't matter, as long as it does the job.

Optional: airbrush lube:
Not necessary unless your brush is really crappy, but can improve the feel a little.
I recommend badger Regdab lube if you feel you must lube. Of the ones I've tried (Badger, Iwata Superlube, K-33 Airbrush Balm), it is the best at actual lubing by a wide margin. Iwata Superlube lubes poorly, and dries out causing sticking. K-33 is a grease rather than a liquid, so it stays put well, and doesn't dry out, but doesn't lube much better than Iwata lube. Badger lube is super runny, so you have to apply it carefully, but it lubes brilliantly.

Extras that are popular, but I don't use/recommend:
MAC valves. Like I said above, I don't like bulky stems, so IMO just get a better regulator, and keep it by your bench.
Similarly: quick connects: only actually saves you like 1/2 a second compared to screwing/unscrewing the hose, but adds lots of bulk/length to the stem. If you really need to switch brushes often enough to need that 1/2 second, a multi-hose air manifold would be even faster.

[Marine0846]

Thank you Connectamabob.

I too have been thinking about an airbrush.
Excellent run down of what is out there.

[racm32]

Wow that's a lot of great info. I think I underestimated the cost range to get started s bit. Will shop around with your recommendations in the for front. Thank you.

[FifteensAway]

Probably best description of airbrushes I've ever encountered.  And I still haven't worked up the courage to use one.

DO NOT USE AIRBRUSHES INDOORS IN ENCLOSED SPACES!  DO USE A HIGH QUALITY RESPIRATOR NO MATTER WHERE YOU USE AN AIRBRUSH!

The particles are so small they can float in the air for days - a lot of days - and penetrate into your lungs or anyone else's lungs who enters that space (like your own children if you have them) and can lead to devastatingly debilitating diseases.

Yes, airbrushes give spectacular results in the hands of those with skill and knowledge to use them well.  But educate yourself as much on the health hazards as the mechanics.

I've known two people who paid a high price for ignoring the proper safety precautions.

[tomrommel1]

You should use a airbrush booth with a suction unit to suck the particles away while using the airbrush I use this one:

https://www.zinnfigur.com/Farben-Werkzeuge/Airbrush/Airbrush-Zubehoer/Absauganlage-Sparmax-SB-88.html

[Ballardian]

While it's true that modern acrylic paints are about as non-toxic as anything you'll find, you are creating aerosolised tiny particles of what is essentially plastic, so a mask would be a good buy (£20-25 for a decent one with replaceable filters) - or you could go with the booth - they vary, with cheap ones going for £65 with something better at the £150 mark.
 If you haven't bought the brush yet I've got four good entry level suggestions ranging from £60 -80, cheapest to most expensive (all gravity fed brushes);


Iwata Neo -  (made for rather than by Iwata) .35mm nozzle/needle, good for most modelling work. It's a solid little brush, only let down by it's rather fragile needle nozzle - it's easy to overtighten, breaking the screw thread off in the barrel - a bit of a bugger to get it out after.

Harder & Steenbeck Ultra - .2 or .4mm nozzle - perhaps a little better than the Neo, the nozzle is attached to a larger assembly, rather than just screwed into the barrel, making it easier to clean. It's possible to buy with a couple of different nozzle sizes, giving you slightly more flexibility, for slightly more moolah. The main drawback for H&S brushes are their needles, which are a bit soft & prone to getting bent - not something you want as a bent tip can rip a furrow through your expensive nozzle.

Sparmax - the MAX 3 & DH-103 - .3mm nozzles -  both reputedly decent (Sparmax a known quantity for compressors) - though I'm afraid I don't know much more about them. Similar in price to the Neo & Ultra.

Ultimate Airbrush Apex - .35mm nozzle -  made by the Ultimate Airbrush people (paint, cleaners & thinners for airbrushes) for the people at International scale modeller. This looks pretty decent for the money (about £80), nicking characteristics from both Iwata & H&S (including H&S's nice 'floating' nozzle set-up)

These all seem to be good entry choices, but, as you'll find out, people often find something about a particular brand appeals to them ( for instance I love Iwata's & have been using HP-CH's for a while & don't think I'm ever going to need 'more' aibrush than that, but they're a £200+ brush).
 So you'll find partizan opinion - like I've never cared much for Pasche or Badger, but some people love them - but at entry level it's not about perfection, but getting a good, solid bit of kit that won't send you screaming into the hills (avoid £20 Amazon specials) when it gums up on your first attempt, ease of use & maintenance are key - all of the above seem to have that to a greater or lesser degree.
  Hope that's of some use!

(Also you have to bear in mind what you're going to blow through it - acrylics don't make any particular demands other than a little thinner, bur some brushes will not like laquer or solvent based paints, which can degrade the internal seals & even the barrels of cheap brushes - check with the manufacturers site as their suitability.)

[Connectamabob]

From what little pics and info I was able to find, I highly suspect Ultimate Airbrush Apex is another Badger subcontracting job. It looks like another minor variation of the brush they make for T&C as the "Vega" and for SATA as the "SATAgraph 4". Which if true would mean they're probably good quality and can use Badger replacement parts.

I've heard Neos are decent. Not as good as proper Iwatas, but better than the normal cheap Chinese brushes.

Workzone appears to be an Australia only brand. Sort of the equivalent of Home Depot in the US having a house branded AB (they don't). Wasn't able to find much info on it, but the price makes me think it's a one of the rebadged generic Chinese brushes. Australia is probably a prime market for those, as AUS suffers crushing import markups that make the major brands expensive and rare, from what I understand.

Chinese manufacturing can be good when it's being supervised by a non-Chinese parent company. It's the stuff that's made under their own auspices and sold to whoever wants to slap their name on the side that you wanna watch out for. Master AB, Harbor Freight, and Wall-Mart are known "Major brands" of this sort of thing, and IMO should be avoided unless you're willing to risk a lot of faff and tinkering for your frugality.

I used to buy that way back in my 20s. Loved Harbor Freight for allowing me to stock up on dirt cheap tools willy-nilly. Since then I've lost a lot of my my patience for tools (or products in general, really) that don't "just work". My cheapskate days are long over now, not because I've gotten any richer, but because my time and energy feels more valuable to me now. I now always advocate buying something you know will be solid over taking a risk in the name of saving a few bucks, 'cause the last thing I'd want is to be tinkering with the tool instead of the project at hand, or to be in a situation where "I could do this if I had tool X", when I have a "tool X", it's just functionally worthless and so taunting me by it's presence and sunk cost.

IMO cheaping out as a beginner is an illusory concept, as the whole premise of "trying it out" is that it's something you're hoping will work out. If cheaping out significantly raises he chances of a false negative, then you're sabotaging yourself. It puts you in the weird position of not knowing if a failure was due to ABing in general, or just a bad tool without going ahead and buying the better tool to verify. If you're not wiling to do that (which of course you aren't, as that was the premise of buying cheap to try in the first place), you'll never really know, so the trying was a worthless experience. And if you're hoping it'll work out, then buying a good brush first off saves you money over buying a bad brush then buying a good one later. So either way, it's a false economy if you're actually thinking about the big picture instead of just looking at price tags in the moment. It only works out if you happen to win the QC gamble and get a decent cheapie on your first try, but since that's a gamble it's not something that's smart to plan for.

Only buy cheap iffy tools if you already well know what you're in for, and there's literally no other way you could get access those tools.

I know this in part because I went through it personally. I spent like 15 years having to drag myself to airbrush anything because my only airbrush was a POS, only to have it go from a chore to something I love overnight after finally springing for an actual good one. The difference was so night and day that I could never, EVER recommend anyone even take even the chance of getting a bad AB as their first AB, and seeing people who got lucky with a good cheapie make that recommendation makes me cringe to the bone marrow. Losing that gamble can seriously screw you over.

[Steinberg]

What about advice on pressure? Lots of people say that a good regulator is very important. What pressure(s) are best to use?  Is it dependent on paint or effect. Useful info for a noob.

[Connectamabob]

Pressure varies according to what you're trying to do, and how thick your paint is. Generally most work is done in the 15-25 psi range. Higher pressures than that tend to be the domain of fabric painting (like T shirts and the like), as the high air pressure helps embed the paint in the fabric, but you will never need to go above 25 for pretty much any other use case.

This is why I recommend looking for a 0-60 or even 0-30 psi regulator. The standard regulators sold for airbrushing are really just repackaged ordinary air tool regulators, and the 0-120 range puts your entire airbrush-usable range in one tiny corner of the dial where it's hard to make small or accurate adjustments. I have no idea why they do this, but it's easy enough to avoid if you know the option exists.

The thicker the paint, the more pressure is needed to pull it through the brush and atomize it. The lower the pressure, the more control and finesse you have, but the more you have to thin the paint to make it flow well. And generally speaking, fluids atomize better at higher pressures than at lower (this is one area where brush quality comes into play: a better brush will atomize better at lower pressures, and will generate less overspray in general). Too much pressure for too thin a paint, and you get spidering (where the air pushes wet paint out from the impact area along the surface in little streaky droplets). Too little pressure for too thick a paint and you get spattery atomization or failure to spray.

So if you're, say, undercoating a vehicle or building, you'd thin the paint less and dial it up to 20-25 psi so you can get a solid coat in fewer passes. If you're shading nooks and crannies on the same, you might keep it at that pressure but get closer and not pull back as far on the trigger, so as to get a nicely feathered gradient.

But if you're trying to do something with fine lines, like detail shading on a figure, or putting scale graffiti on a wall or something like that, you'll need to get in really close (spray pattern diameter is controlled by distance from the surface), which means dropping pressure to avoid overspray or spidering, which means thinning a bit more.

In most circumstances it is best to use the highest pressure you can comfortably get away with, and thin for that target pressure. The two main exceptions IMO are
1)when airbrushing figures and tiny parts specifically, it's often better to use lower pressure, as high pressure tends to hit small objects like a firehose, and
2)when airbrushing primers, it's best to avoid thinning if at all possible, as thinning can weaken adhesion, and adhesion is the whole point of primer (a good primer coat means not having to worry about the paint on top of it having weaker adhesion). If your primer is too thick to airbrush straight out of the bottle/can, switch to a different primer rather than try to thin it.

Substrate plays a role too. Absorbent substrates like paper are more forgiving of excessive pressure, as excess paint will soak in as it hits rather than staying on the surface where it can be pushed around by the air. For this reason it's a good idea to practice using non-absorbent substrates. Disposable plastic water/juice bottles are an abundant source of easy to paint plastic to practice on, or you can designate an abandoned model kit as practice hull and just paint over it repeatedly.

Beyond this, it is impossible to recommend specific pressures, as they will vary from paint to paint, brush to brush, and task to task. You just have to tinker and practice to find the right balance, but this is easy as long as you understand the above.

[Ballardian]

 I can confirm that the Neo is a decent brush, I picked one up a couple of years ago primarily for priming/basecoats/varnishes & found it capable of decent detail work. As I mentioned, you just have to be careful with the nozzle, if you're removing it for cleaning, resist the urge to apply too much pressure when screwing it back in.
 Connectamabob's been pretty thorough & got you covered for pretty much everything else - good luck & I hope you have fun with it.

[katie]

One relatively simple (albeit not the cheapest) option is to go on a course about airbrushing, find out what they use, get to grips with it and basically buy that to use at home.

The badger UK guys do courses specially about airbrushing miniatures; they have a room full of quite nice badger kit so I just bought that stuff.

Mind you, buying and giving up on some mistakenly bought airbrushes is more expensive than that route...

[Connectamabob]

That's a great idea, if you have the ability/opportunity. You'll get some hands-on Q&A teaching, which can be invaluable, but also  the opportunity to try out different types of brushes. Buying a first brush can be a blind bargain terms of features (you don't know if what you're getting is really what you want until after you've tried it for a bit), so having the opportunity to try out different models in a classroom setting will give you a direction in terms of what kind of feed system you'd best prefer, what kind of nozzle design, etc.

Perhaps better would be arranging some sort of brand-neutral meet-and-compare at a con or local game shop, where people can fondle each others tools to see what they fancy.