Dusting off the airbrush

Today is a rather exciting day for me. In order to proceed with my plant stop motion project, it was necessary for me to order various bits of equipment and other supplies. The first little tests assignment I’ve given myself is to build a plastic model kit of a Browning 50 caliber machine gun.

 That model has shown up in the mail. I also had to go rooting through the storage box to find my old airbrush. I saved up money from a summer job back in the early 1980s to buy this airbrush. And it still works. However, I haven’t used it since the early 1980s. For those of you who don’t know how and airbrush operates a rather simple procedure. The airbrush has little reservoir that holds your paints and it connects to an air hose on one end and the other end of the hose connects to an air compressor. Luckily for me I already own the compressor that I had used in the past for my nail gun. However, the nail gun adapter was much larger than my teeny-weeny airbrush. So I had to figure out what type of adapter I needed, then order that as well. That has arrived, and so has some specially formulated lacquer paints designed to replicate gunmetal. So it seems as if everything is in place to start my first little test.

I picked the 50 caliber machine gun for very good reason. As you can see in the pictures below, I’ve already done extensive work in 3D with this type of weapon. So I’m interested to see if I will be able to port my skills over from 3D to this real world of tangible model making.

 In my hand are 2 bottles of paint that, if used correctly should make my model look like metal. We'll have to see if it works.

 Here you can see what I normally do, I feel comfortable with this medium. Never to late to try something new.