Airbrush Techniques for Realistic Bird Carving

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In this painting tutorial, learn how to use an airbrush to create smooth, subtle color transitions and realistic effects. The demonstration explores airbrush techniques for adding depth, shading, and soft layers of color to a carved bird.

Transcript

The use of the airbrush when applied to bird carving can be a very useful tool and it can do things much more quickly and with much more subtlety than using the brushes to apply paint pigments. But I must caution you because using the airbrush can be very seductive. You’ll start to notice things you can do with it and then you’ll want to use it some more and more. So use it prudently but use it effectively and it could become a real ally in the art of bird carving.

Four basic points in using the airbrush. When shooting acrylic paints through the airbrush, your paint consistency, number one, should be about that of skim milk. The paint, as I will demonstrate in a minute or two, should drip off of your brush in a consistent way that will allow it to atomize when it’s introduced into the air stream. Two, you must keep your tool clean.

Typical to airbrushing is troubleshooting.

When the airbrush has been spraying correctly and then it stops spraying correctly, meaning it starts to spatter or maybe paint is not coming out, that is a sure sign that your tip is getting clogged up with dried paint. Remember, we’re spraying acrylic paints and acrylic paints air dry. When you’re introducing thinned acrylic paints into an air stream, that amplifies and accelerates the drying process and it makes the whole works want to dry out and clog up a little quicker. So when you’re using your airbrush, be a little more aggressive with it and keep the charge going. Don’t spray and pause, spray and pause, or you’re going to give your pigments time to dry out on the paint nozzle and that creates big problems. If that occurs, take the nozzle off, flush it with clean cool water, make sure all the pigments are out of it, reattach it, spray clean water through your airbrush and you should be all set.

One more word about maintenance for your airbrush at the end of the day, When you’re done using your airbrush for the day, want to avoid any type of paint residue or pigment residue drying up in the cup or the airbrush. Another good idea is just take some common Windex, put it into your cup and spray, once you’ve cleaned your airbrush, into a paper towel or something so that it’s not atomizing the Windex and you’re breathing it in, and spray that through until just clear water or Windex starts coming through the nozzle. And that will not only clean your airbrush, but it helps to lubricate it also and keep it ready for the next application.

Just like I’ve talked about with painting with the brushes, always dip them in water first. When I’m going to begin airbrushing, I always put a little bit of clean, clear water and I spray water through the airbrush. Now, if it’s wintertime and you’re in a northern climate and it’s dry inside, you can also humidify your air. Or just take a section of a paper towel and spray a little bit of water through your airbrush until it’s spraying. You can hear it and you can actually see it, how it’s spraying well. This is an Aztec airbrush that I have set to double action. When I press down air, and as I pull back on the trigger it introduces, in this case water, with apologies to my peregrine who’s taking a shower.

It introduces water or very shortly paint pigment into the air stream and the volume of such is controlled directly by my trigger pressure. So it takes a little practice, but anything worth learning to do well takes a little practice. So I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it. So, to get going with your airbrushing, I’m going show you a little bit about what it can do and what it can’t do.

When you’re airbrushing, I recommend you take a little bit of a paper towel, take a piece, fold it, and just hold this in your left hand if you’re right handed and spray into the paper towel until you get a good feel for the airbrush. It should get to the point where you don’t even think about using the airbrush. Your thoughts should occur with the surface area that you’re going be applying the paint and as you use the airbrush it could just become an extension of your hand itself. It becomes a very natural motion.

When you’re airbrushing pigment, keep your airbrush moving. The minute you stop and it forms a static spray, you’re going to start getting spidering, which I will certainly demonstrate in a few minutes. And then when you’re finished airbrushing, you just detach all the component parts, flush it out with clean water, and you’ll be all set to go. And the very important thing that comes with the practice of the airbrush is aim.

You want to make darn well sure that your trigger pressure is in concert with your aim so that you can also get the pigment directly where it needs to go. So, with that said, let’s add a little pigment to the airbrush and we’ll get on to applying some paint and I’m going to show you a little bit of airbrush magic.

To demonstrate the application of pigment via the airbrush, I’m going to use Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Umber. Fiftyfifty mixed together will give me a nice rich black color. That black will show up very nice on the white paper to show you how we’re going to proceed. I’m going to put an equal amount of Ultramarine Blue and an equal amount of Burnt Umber into this cup.

With an eyedropper, I’m going to mix half an eye dropper worth of clean water and a drop of flow medium. Now the flow medium, when added to it, will extend the viscosity. That was two drops and that’s perfectly okay.

Do not, do not substitute flow medium for water or it’s going to shift the viscosity and the thickness of your paints and it’s going to create more of a glaze look. Once I mix my paints, using a brush to mix them around, you’ll see that the Ultramarine Blue and the Burnt Umber combine to give you a beautiful rich black color. Now, I’m still a little bit thick.

You can see as that comes off, the drips are gonna sort of come off. That’s a little thick. So what I’ll do is I’ll just substitute.

I’ll add a little bit more water to this.

That is not the growl of a hungry tiger, folks. That’s the compressor turning on to give me a little bit of air to, the paint now is the right consistency. Watch how it drips off the brush. One, two, just about a drip per second would be just about ideal viscosity for coming through the airbrush.

Of course, clean your brush first, put it aside, that beautiful rich black color. So now I’m going to purge the airbrush of all water, shake it, spray it to get all the water out. Even though when it stops spraying water, shake it again, you’ll see another burst of water come out.

So, get in the habit of purging your airbrush before. If not, you’re going to get a big splop of water coming out first and that would be un good. So, to begin, take a piece of folded paper towel, make sure your airbrush is spraying consistently, just press down And it should start spraying. You can see the texture of the paper towel coming through because I’m spraying at a low angle right now. You can see just air nothing and as I pull back, look at that, it all comes out perfectly.

Spraying on a paper towel is a really good thing to practice at first before you commit to your bird carving. You’ve spent so much time and effort transforming a block of wood into a beautiful carved bird, you certainly don’t want to pepper it with airbrush overspray right now. So practice, practice, practice. Occasionally, you’ll get a little bit of overspray as paint tends to coagulate on the tip. So anytime that I’m going to airbrush, I always keep a paper towel handy.

Now, what we have here are two circles. One of the beauties of the airbrush is that we are going to transform a two dimensional surface into a three-dimensional surface very, very easily and very quickly. What we have are two circles.

Feathers, as they apply to a bird’s body, are not flat. They are conical in shape and cupped. So as an artist, we want to show very subtly that three-dimensional quality of the feathers. What I’m going to do is I’m going to transform with just very careful airbrushing. One of these circles, I’m going to turn it into a sphere just by putting a little shadowing on it. Now, I’m using what’s called a negative pattern, meaning that I’m going to be covering up the outside and I’m going to be spraying in the the sides now. Now as it comes through, I’m just gonna give a little bit of a shadow.

See, it’s spattering just a bit, and that’s that happens on occasionally. It happens to the best of us. But you can see how it transforms that flat two dimensional surface into a three-dimensional sphere. That concept, this is a very rudimentary illusion of the concept we’re after and that’s how we’re gonna be using this airbrush, to achieve different effects.

You can take patterns and you can you can do some feathering on your bird by just cutting out simple little cardboard patterns. You can lay those down like this and you can spray right around the pattern using the same whoop, dripping a little bit there.

You can do a little bit of shading like that when you’re feathering.

Contrary to that, you can turn your pattern upside down and you can use the round part here and you can come around and you can do the same, giving it a little darker root and a little bit lighter towards the outer edge and you get a totally different type of effect. On a textured surface this can be very effective for showing softness but again, be very prudent with how you use the airbrush because you can over spray and do it too much. This is a very subtle effect.

Being a curious sort, late one night I was in the studio and I was kind of messing around with the concept of using different types of patterns to create feather techniques. And as I had showed you, I used little paper and use an absorbent type of paper. Avoid your patterns that has a glossy finish because the paint will not absorb into your pattern paper. It will tend to wick up and it can transfer onto your work surface creating a big mess.

But I was using these little pieces of paper and I was doing some very subtle feathering technique like this and everything was going just great. Then I had to do the soft breast area of a bird and I started thinking, let’s try something else. I was doing that. So I started messing around with different implements that I would use.

And mister Compressor’s charging himself up so we can get things going here. And just out of curiosity, I grabbed a three quarter inch oval wash brush, one of the brushes I use all the time. And I put that down, and I flared it out almost like an eyelash shape, and I started spraying around it.

And suddenly, I started getting some of the most beautiful soft feathery effects on the surface.

This really transformed the whole concept of this illusion of softness. And then if you go with different type brushes, I started experimenting. I used a little half inch slightly wet half inch oval wash brush that gave me a little bit more flaring to it, so I sprayed around that. And the potential of this, you’re only limited by your own imagination and you can do all types of beautiful types of patterning like this to achieve feathery effects on the surface of your bird.

Any type of brush would work. Here’s just an inexpensive little China bristle brush that I use. But if you’re doing, say, a a seabird, like maybe an eider that has those dense dense flat type feathering through the chest, you can come in and you can you can just spray and you can modify the shape of the tip of the brush by trimming it with scissors. But, you know, try out new things and what works best for you is really what’s gonna be best for you because this this is just the beginning of this technique, but it really works beautifully.

Another thing that we can do while we’re on that subject is the underside of a lot of the major flight feathers like the tail retresses of most hawks has some subtle barring on it. So if we want to use our airbrush to show this barring, we can take our feather.

And again, I’m using a paper template just to show you.

Let’s suppose that that’s the tail feather of, oh, I don’t know, adult northern goshawk. They have very distinct five bars across the underside of the tail. We’ll take a little bit of absorbent paper, fold it in half so you’ve got a distinctive crease in it, and then you’re going to tear a slight chevron shape to it. And the benefit of the tear is that it gives you a beautiful, kind of an uneven surface and it’s absorbent. So, you can take this and to do the barring on these feathers, because we’re going to be airbrushing, you can start at the very top here and you can come across on that feather and put some beautiful subtle barring in that feather.

Just so easy using that torn piece of paper pattern like that.

Very, very simple and very quick. And yes, know I’m getting a bit of a spattering in there. It’s bit dry in the environment right now. In my own studio, if I have a problem with dryness in the air, quite often I’ll get a little ultrasonic humidifier that you can get at any hardware store or Walmart or Home Depot, and I will put a little ultrasonic humidifier just to humidify the area where I’m going to be painting. And it really extends the use of your paints and it makes the whole process go a whole lot easier. But this type of barring that occurs on a lot of immature plumage birds and a lot of adult hawks and some eagles as well, it’s a very effective way to show this type of plumage patterning. Quite effective as well on the backs of some birds too.

So give it a shot, good luck, and I’ll look forward to seeing the results at the next show we’re at.