Thinning for airbrusing

You can try dipping a toothpick into the mix and checking the viscosity that way.  Properly thinned, a drop should form and fall off at roughly the same size & speed as the afore-mentioned milk.  So if you eyeball a few milk drops and lock that image in your brain, you should be able to gauge the paint's viscosity that way...

Just make sure you get some eye-droppers or my personal pref, plastic pipettes, for measuring ratios... It's a lot easier to count drops than it is to count splashes..  

thermoshok wrote:

is it 3 to 1 or 2 to 1?

There is no correct ratio because of bottle-to-bottle variation.  Even if you are dealing with identical colors.  I've had a bottle that was perfect for airbrushing (and no it was not marketed as such) while I've have other bottles that were the consistency of thick cream or syrup and needed a lot of thinner.  For one starting out, I can appreciate the frustration, but you really just have to experiment and practice.  You'll quickly get the hang of it.

Andy 

i use tamiya paints mostly cause of convienience and i rarely use model masters only for certain colors any suggestion on how to mix those model master paints???

I'd always heard the 2% rule, but never really quite visualized it.

So I went and bought a gallon of 2% milk. (And a box of Cocoa Pebbles... )

I mix paint in these little plastic jars I got from Hobby Lobby. So I poured a little milk in it, and looked at it... I mean really studied it. I used a toothpick to pull some up the sides and see how fast it ran back down, how it clinged to the sidewalls, how it behaved if I sloshed it around.

I find it's much easier to thin it visually, so to speak, than trying to determine a ratio. I never measure anyway.

Since I did that little experiment- plus some great advice from Ross on some tricks for Pollyscale paints, my airbrushing has gone very smooth!