Finally got some time to try out the new airbrush and compare some paints.

For these first test I used the “Tamiya Spray Work HG Airbrush III”, with the air compressor output left wide open at somewhere between 40 and 60 psi. I know, way too much pressure, but the best way to learn is to do things the wrong way, of course. I’m using Plamo Colour’s thinner for all of the paints.

The Plamo Colour paints cost 4 GBP per 60 ml, counting a shipping overhead of 20% this comes out to about 5,70 EUR per 60 ml, so roughly about 10 cents per ml. The gaianotes are about 1,50 EUR per 15 ml, but have a shipping and import overhead of about 100%, so that ends up being 3 EUR per 15 ml, so roughly 20 cents per ml.

The first color I tried out is the, solvent based, Maroon from Plamo Colour. Mixed at 1:1 (thinner to paint). Painted two spoons using 2ml of paint, which is about 10 cents per spoon. Difficult to get an even coverage at this air pressure.

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After that I tried out one of the gaianotes paints. The 153 Stone Blue, which apparently is a matte color. I first mixed this at 2:1 (thinner to paint), but this blocked sometimes, so I adjusted it to 2.5:1. Even at this pressure, it was fairly easy to get an even surface coverage. Using 2 ml of paint I managed to paint 4 spoons, which is double what I got out of the same amount of Plamo Colour paints, but also ends up at 10 cents worth of paint per spoon.

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I tried another color from the Plamo Colour range, this time the Lavender. Mixed the same as the Maroon, it performed about the same too. I did get three spoons out of it this time, so that’s about 7 cents of paint per spoon this time around. This paint has to be shaken heavily before use, though, as it seems there’s some white pigment that’s sinking a bit easily.

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Lastly I tested with a glossy colour from the gaianotes paints, the Viridian Green 013. Mixed at 2.5:1 (thinner to paint), using 2 ml of paint. I managed to get 3 spoons painted, but the surface coverage was really bad, and not useable at all. It seems there’s a significant difference between gaianotes’ matte and glossy paints.

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Tomorrow I will compare the paints at different air pressures.