Lakota warrior 'Kills First' on Huion tablet

After creating trial cartoons and impressionistic portraits on the Huion 610 Pro Drawing Tablet I thought I'd try a realistic color portrait. Reference image was a small B&W photograph of Lakota warrior 'Kills First' (...) taken by Gertrude Kasebier. The image I am working on is large enough to make giclee prints. Below you see the sequence of this portrait; the newest phase on top. At this point I am making the drawing after which I will apply detailed textures. I am thinking of making a photo-realistic version and a more impressionistic version for print. I may touch up the prints with an analog airbrush afterwards. 

Kiowa warrior - digital painting

I picked up my Huion digital drawing tablet again. It has certain advantages over creating analog art, in particular airbrushing. If you project drawings to trace, you need to print the reference image, digital does not require this. Undoing or changing parts of the painting is easy in digital art. If your not sure if a change will work well, just save the image and experiment on the copy; if things go wrong, you can always revert to the saved image.

If hue, contrast etc. are not to your liking, you can change it any time. It is also possible to work in layers that can be turned on or off at will or given a filtered or unfiltered transparency. Working on minute detail is easy with digital tools; just zoom in to increase control. Correcting mistakes is as easy as pushing Control + Z on the keyboard and there is no 'blue shift' when covering colors with white lines or areas as is the case in analog airbrushing.

Below are some of the steps I recorded. The oldest phase is at the bottom and the newer ones about that. The drawing was based on a painting of the fabulous Howard Terpning who created an absolutely fabulous portfolio. Mr. Terpning never ceases to inspire me and his art is never matched by any photograph. He is in an elevated category of his own.

The Sopranos Freehand Airbrush

Lately I've been submerged in digital work, DTP, webdesign etc. and had no time to airbrush. Since two days ago I decided to make time for that and submit Inspire's waterborne H2O paint to a proper test. It is the best airbrush paint I've come across so far. No clogging whatsoever and hardly any tip dry, even after the paint had been in the open paint cup of my Iwata HP-BH for a long time (a day or so).

I had an old piece of drawing paper (49 x 32 cm) laying about and started to freehand airbrush a double portrait of The Sopranos. Inspire's H2O allows to spray very consistent thin lines. I used Black Smoke for this portrait, just filled the paint cup almost to the brim with water and added three drops of paint. No reducer or other media, stirred well and began to paint. Air pressure just high enough to push the paint out.

Below you see the sequence of this portrait. Below that the latest photograph of this work in progress. It is almost done, I just need to add some texture and then it will be finished.

Sequence so far

 

Most recent phase

 

Inspire H2O is easily removed after spraying, which makes sense since the paint does not clog or leave tip dry. First run water through the gun (also blow back), then cleaner in the same way and finally water again. The needle is squeaky clean. The paint is really a charm to work with. I can honestly recommend it to artists who spray fine detail.

Aug 25 2015 - Finished.

New kid on the block: waterborne Inspire H2O

When cleaning paint after the airbrush has (visibly) run out of paint, I always pour airbrush cleaner in the gun's paint cup, suck it up and blow it back several times with a pipette. It draws paint residue (paint particles and flakes) into the pipette that I blow from the pipette into the spray-out container so that paint particles and flakes will not clog the nozzle. I do this until no more particles and flakes are visible in the pipette. After that I blow cleaner through the airbrush and also draw back and lock the needle and put my finger on the tip of the nozzle to reverse the flow of the cleaner in the airbrush in order to release stuck paint residue from the airbrush. After that I blow cleaner and finally water through the airbrush.

Spray-out

When cleaning in such a way, it becomes obvious that most paints form particles and flakes that are left in the gun after the airbrush stopped spraying paint. Createx does it, Holbein Aeroflash, Illu-Color and Vallejo Premium all leave some type of residue inside the pipette and on the inner wall of the airbrush paint cup when cleaning according to the method explained above. However, this is not the case with the relatively new waterborne Inspire H2O. The pipette and paint cup remain almost entirely clean.... The first paint I used that has this excellent property.

I also noticed that while mixing the paint before spraying, for which I also use an other pipette to thoroughly mix the paint and reducer, Inspire H2O hardly left any residue in the pipette after the mixing was done. I think that is a sign that the pigmentation is very fine and the binder and solvent are doing a great job. Spraying with Inspire confirmed my suspicion; the paint performed miraculously well in my Iwata Micron SB. Below you see a test that gives an indication of how well this paint behaves.

The measuring scale is in centimeters

To spray the text shown above I used Inspire H2O in the following ratio: Paint : Reducer = 1 : 15 setting the air pressure just high enough to drive out the paint (somewhere around 7 psi or half a bar). But what is more amazing is that after leaving the airbrush untouched for 3 hours (with the paint still in the cup) it sprayed just as well as when I first sprayed it. And it gets better: same thing after 6 hours...., as if spraying with freshly mixed paint.

Inspire H2O 'Black Smoke' and Reducer I used for the test

Another positive property of the H2O paint is that it hardly leaves any tip dry. In this respect it is on par or better than solvent-based paints. And as you can see, the testing was done with black, which traditionally is a 'difficult' color (gross pigment, clogging and tip dry in most brands). Next week I am going to buy other colors of this type of paint and continue to experiment with it. No need to say I am quite impressed by this new paint for airbrush artists.

After 6 months of not airbrushing

After not having airbrushed for over 6 months due to a lack of time, I picked up the gun to spray at the Airbrush Services Almere 12.5 year anniversary in Lelystad, The Netherlands. I prefer to spray portraits of Native Americans, because usually there is a lot of expression and texture in the images. My trusted Iwata HP-BH sprayed awful in spite of cleaning regularly. Later after I returned home I found out that the needle packing leaked, which allowed paint to reach the needle spring all the way in the back of the airbrush.

Iwata HP-BH

I continued spraying with the Micron SB that I hadn't used for a long time. A kind of re-discovery of that gun. It sprayed magnificently and allowed me to shoot the Vallejo Premium paint exactly where I wanted. I used a mixture of 1 drop of paint and 20 drops of reducer and very low air pressure (just enough to push out the paint). Vallejo Premium has an enormous covering and adherence on almost all surfaces (paper, board, metal, plastic, wood etc.) so spraying very thin (transparent) in many layers allows to correct with an eraser. If sprayed too thick it is a hell of a job to remove the paint from the surface, if not impossible.

Iwata Micron SB

A peculiarity of Vallejo Premium brown (color number: 62.018) is that after spraying a while, you start spraying a greenish hue instead of brown. I suspect the green pigment is heavier than other pigments in the mix which causes it to sink to the bottom of the paint cup after some time. Sucking up the paint in a pipette and returning it to the paint cup several times returns the paint to its intended, original color. It is a thing to keep in mind for artists who use this paint, that is of an excellent quality - comparable with Holbein Aeroflash for half the price per bottle. The paint also tends to disperse somewhat - crisp lines become less sharp after a while and evenly and smoothly sprayed areas become textured.

Vallejo Premium 62.018

Below you see a sequence of my work in progress. The images were photographed with the camera of a Samsung S4 Mini at different times in the day / night, which accounts for the difference in lighting. The portrait is sprayed on 50 x 35 cm airbrush paper. At the very bottom you see a photograph of my airbrush workplace. The portrait is attached to my lightbox.

Photo shot with better cam than that of a
Samsung S4 Mini phone in daylight -
color differences are amazing

Rushed to finish to try Inspire H2O in next portrait

Vallejo paint dispersed. Attempt to correct with different brand.

10 drops Vallejo Premium

So far I used 9 drops of Vallejo Premium

The portrait on my homemade lightbox.

Airbrush innovations

Since Jens Paasche built the AB - better known as the Turbo - there haven't been an awful lot of innovations in the world of airbrush. Testor conceived the Aztek, which is basically an idea bordering on brilliant design, that was ruined by the use of inferior materials. It keeps production costs extremely low, which is always good for profit, as does the limited durability of the parts, both of which are the result of the poor materials of which the airbrush is constructed. One of Testor's officers told me during an airbrush fair of many years ago, that the Aztek was built from only 8 dollars of materials (....). Testor stopped the production of the Aztek recently (2022). But when the thing was relatively new and used with a properly diluted paint - rather thin than more viscous - it did not perform bad at all. In addition, the materials from which it was built, made it work with the more aggressive thinner and solvent based paint. So, unfortunately the commercial aspect prevailed over usability for creative artists.

Paasche Turbo

Testor Aztek

Fischer AeroStar

In complete opposition to Testor's approach French manufacturer Fischer invented the AeroStar, that featured an innovative design and functionality, while using exotic materials like titanium and magnesium. The combination of design and use of costly materials made this airbrush extremely expensive. It sentenced the fabulous tool to a lamentably short career, in spite of its absolutely unparalleled performance. Somewhere between these two extremes Iwata operates. It produces high quality airbrushes that are deliberately made incompatible with each other (it is not possible to exchange nozzles between Iwata's models, needles and other parts) and sells them for the highest prices in the airbrush market.

Iwata HP-BH

Harder & Steenbeck Infinity

Harder & Steenbeck Evolution, which parts are
interchangeable with the Infinity shown above

Yet an other policy is maintained by Harder & Steenbeck (recently bought by Iwata) that favors exchangeability of parts of its models, which resulted in gaining a considerable market share. But neither Iwata and Harder & Steenbeck have introduced any stunning real innovations, that probably is accepted by airbrush artists, because they simply don't know any better than what they are currently offered and familiar with. Up to now Iwata has not changed anything about the optimized usability and reasonable price of the Harder & Steenbeck airbrush guns.

I posted an innovative airbrush construction idea some time ago, that probably is too far out; the device would have an ultrasonic pump that would be capable of pushing out the smallest clusters of pigment, while agitating the paint (and therefore make the paint flow better). But besides such a revolutionary idea (for the airbrush trade anyway), there are enough improvements that are possible, but few of them are found in airbrush guns currently on offer.

Colani airbrush

One such improvement could be a pistol grip like in the Colani and similar brushes (Grex, Sparmax etc.), but with the possibility of double action operation. This could be done by using a split tall pistol type trigger of which the upper part (colored red) controls the amount of paint and the bottom part (colored blue) the amount of air given. An other improvement could be the attachment to the brush of a small paint container by a flexible hose. This would result in the benefit of gravity feed, without the nasty risk of involuntarily spilling paint on the artwork. The container could be clipped to the easel or even to the top pocket of the artist's shirt.

Airbrush gun concept

I may elaborate on construction details later (still brainstorming...). But the above image may already give a rough idea about what is taking place in my brain concerning a more ergonomic and effective type of airbrush gun. The hose at the top leads the paint from the container (not shown) to the brush, the hose at the rear end is for the air supply. Turning the brass wheel controls the air pressure, the wheel at the bottom adjusts the response sensitivity of the airbrush (by relocating lever hinge points). Spring tension can be adjusted at the back (above the air hose) as in traditional airbrushes.

The Telling of Legends

The inspiration came from a painting by Howard Terpning called 'The Telling of Legends'. I decided to make a different type of legend. Changed the expression on the old man's face and gave the young man a Winchester rifle. I might rename the painting to 'Peace pipes and Winchesters'. This is a work in progress (Feb 16 2015). If you click on one of the images and turn the scroll wheel of your mouse, you will see all images appear as in a slide show, allowing you to see the differences between the various stages more clearly. Oldest stage at the top, most recent at bottom.