Musing on…Why Airbrush

When I talk about the art that I do, a question comes up from time to time: why do I airbrush? I take that to mean, why do you use the airbrush as your tool of choice instead of a brush, pencil, chisel, etc.? There really isn’t an easy answer for that other than, it’s the one I want to use.

My personal creative journey is littered with many of the tools of artists…though not so much the chisel. Growing up, I was given the same materials as most children: pencils, crayons, and cake watercolors. In school, we got to dabble in clay, tempra paints, papier mache, and a variety of more esoteric media. My mom, who was at the time a stay-at-home mom, introduced me to oil paints, charcoal pencils, and artist papers and canvases. Even so, for many many years my tool of choice was an HB pencil on whatever paper I could find, which was frequently newsprint. I sketched a lot. Drawing was one of those things that I did. And then came the airbrush.

I worked in a hobby shop my senior year in high school. I’m not talking a crafts store like Hobby Lobby or Michael’s, but an old-style hobby shop with models, RC airplanes, electric trains, rockets, and more. Having experience with most of these things through my growing up time, it was a great place to work. Needless to say, it only fueled my enjoyment of building models. By that time, however, I’d become frustrated at trying to paint scale models with a paintbrush. The finish never came out as smooth as I wanted. Enter the Badger 200 airbrush. It was a low-cost single-action modeler’s brush. Immediately my paint jobs improved. I was soon doing more than just painting models, I was also painting up dioramas.

One thing led to another, and I tried to continue painting through college and after. It wasn’t easy fitting it in with my then photography career and my emerging writing passion. Worse, the sorts of paints I had been using were starting to have an effect on my breathing, so I packed away the airbrush and returned to pencils, pens, and computers.

Thing is, the airbrush allows you to do things that you can’t do with traditional tools. If you want to paint on metal, or glass, or any of a number of other supports and you don’t want to leave brush marks, you’re pretty much left with airbrushes. Many, many times over the years I’d jonesed about digging out my old gun (as airbrushes are often called) and solving some painting/art problem I was having.

It wasn’t until I started doing airbrushed tattoos at a shop a friend of mine owned that I again caught the bug hard. I got myself a good brush and a cheap air compressor and started practicing again. You know, when you haven’t done something in a while, it takes some practice to start getting good at it again. Slowly my skill set came back. I’ve since accumulated several more guns and have replaced my cheap compressor with one more production-worthy and much quieter. I settled on a paint brand that has made shooting paint a joy.

Clearly I have a passion for this tool, but I still have a hard time answering why, specifically, the airbrush. I’m not painting cars now, focusing instead on fine art…which means gessoed surfaces. So, I don’t specifically need an airbrush. And, truth be told, it can be a royal pain to use. It certainly takes a lot more skill than brushes do…which I know in no uncertain terms because I’m not generally an airbrush purist; I’ll use a brush (hairy-stick) when it makes sense to use a brush. It’s not that I don’t know how. Maybe it’s just that I like the challenge that an airbrush gives me that a brush doesn’t.

For the most part, I think all artists are slaves to their passions. I could certainly do paintings the traditional way, or I could do pencil sketches, or any of a variety of other much more affordable and portable kinds of art. Maybe it’s because with airbrush you are creating the image without actually touching the support. Instead of applying a daub of paint onto a canvas, you press a button, hear the hiss of air, and (if you have enough control) a color seems to magically appear on the support without you having ever touched it. Wow. It’s so very cool.

Plus, it’s nice to know that if/when I want a specialized T-shirt design, I can just power up the ol’ compressor, shoot some paint, and voila: a one-of-a-kind T-shirt. What’s not to love about that? And then there’s the fact that the paint is (usually) dry when it hits whatever you’re painting on. None of this waiting years like some oil artists have to, or a day or two like watercolorists. Nope, the surface is (usually) dry to the touch almost immediately, and certainly within a second or two of spraying the paint. I really like that part, too.

Why airbrush? It’s the tool that fits me. Much as I don’t write my stories out in longhand (if I have the choice), and instead choose to type my words on a computer keyboard; the visual hunger of my creativity is sated more with a tube that sprays paint than with the more classic methods of application. And that’s what it basically comes down to, the resonance of a tool with the one who wields it. For a while now, it’s been the airbrush that resonates with me.

And then there’s scratchboard…but we’ll leave that for another time :-)