I used a rattle can for my
weekend wonder T-34, and Matt Usher has an excellent article in the December issue on painting from a can. Matt's article focuses on gloss finishes for auto models, but there's good general spray technique info in his article, too. If you build a lot of models, spray-can painting starts getting pretty expensive. If you do only a few a year, it's a viable alternative to the higher initial equipment costs and clean-up time involved with airbrushing. However, a spray can will never allow the kind of precise painting that an airbrush can do--you tend to lose a lot of paint to the walls of your spray booth--and you still need proper ventilation and a good two-stage respirator.