Cratered Hard

I recently picked up an airbrush and a compressor. That set me back a few hundred, but I'm already really enjoying what I'm getting out of it. So in order to learn how to use it a bit BEFORE messing up hundreds of dollars worth of models, I decided to spend 40 bucks on a bag of craters and play around with it. I'd say these came out PRETTY good!

So this is what came out of it. First I sprayed all five of them black with the typical primer for doing that. Once that was done, I set up the airbrush and the compressor, and got to work on it. I was originally very worried that my compressor would have enough pressure to work with the paints, but I was surprised at how wrong I was. I think I could use a stronger compressor, but what I have now works exactly for what I want to do with it anyway. It runs at about 15 PSI or there abouts I think. I think it tries to run at 20, but if you just leave the airgun going it drops to about 15.

Three of the craters were really easy. I honestly just airbrushed them gray, then went to town with the dry brushing technique with a big freaking brush. So the highlights came out great and they look fairly rocky to me. I'm pleased. The blast I wasn't sure how to do, and what I started to do was looking pretty terrible too. When the black wash dried though, I was left pleased with a blackened crater. Happy days!

Then the fun part. I decided two must be ooze filled! So I took a bottle of PVA glue, unscrewed the top, and poured the mess into the crater. The glue creates a bevel at the edge, so suddenly I was left going "Oh no, I'm messing up again. There must be a way to fix this!" Sure enough, there was. I took a sprew, cut a straight bit out of it, and just went around the edges breaking up the bevel and let it ooze up the wall a little bit. This worked fantastically! Once I was done and happy, I let it start to dry. Then it hit me. "Oh man oh man! It needs more stuff in it! I have bits! Where are my bits!" I dug through my bags of marine parts and tyranid parts, and couldn't find anything I wanted to use. Then I found the suckers and went "YAY!" and added one in. Then I found my barrels and chopped them up with my cutters and put them in. Excitement filled me! I know... Nerd! =P

These took about 2 days to dry, well, one day to dry but 2 days before I felt like I could do something with them. I based them black, airbrushed the gray, and dry brushed the rest. Then I was left with the ooze. Bright green, is like yellow. It sucks. You paint it on and you can see all the brush strokes. It looks horrible. It took until Sunday to realize "Oh, I can put masking tape on the rest of the crater, and then airbrush it!" I'm glad I did, because the colors came out fantastic! The green is so.... green!!!! I'm quite pleased. I dry brushed a bit of green on the surrounding rocks to give it ambiance and called it done!

Over all, really pleased. I had a lot of fun using the airbrush, it works wonderfully! I'm really looking forward to painting some vehicles with that now. The layers of paint should go on really smooth and evenly, and I may be able to do some desert patterning. Not quite the camo pattern stuff, but desert patterns for sure.