Cellulose thinners

Black loco
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

One thing I hate when spraying paint is getting bits of dust stuck to the surface. This always seems to happen to me when because I do my airbrushing in the garage. While the air is reasonably free of dust, a few specks still seem to float around.

I might have imagined it but I’m sure I read somewhere those professionals use cellulose thinners, not enamel, when airbrushing. The theory is that the more volatile thinner evaporates faster drying the paint. The faster the paint dries the less chance there is of getting surface contamination (listen to me, “surface contamination” – meaning cr*p in the paint) leading to a better finish.

Now this really matters with gloss paint which takes about a week to go off (for me anyway) but I don’t have anything needing gloss painting so I have had to try the technique with matt black. To be honest a shaved monkey could spray this colour successfully but I had a go anyway.

Result, well it might have dried a little quicker and there certainly isn’t any dust in the finish, I have a feeling that the paint flowed better out of the airbrush as well but I didn’t run any through enamel thinned paint to check. I’ll try this again with the satin varnish later to see if this works.