Airbrushing Made Easy: Part One

Airbrushing isn’t the easiest thing to do; in fact, it’s pretty God damn hard — that is unless you can get the guidance from one of Australia’s best — Stuart Vimpani at the Airbrush School.

STUART VIMPANI from Ultimate Airbrush runs an airbrushing school on the Gold Coast, and when he invited me to do a couple of classes, I jumped at the opportunity. You see I have been dabbling with an airbrush for years, and I’ve done some pretty good jobs on cars and bikes, but I’ve never found my own style. I was basically just drawing with an airbrush and I could never work out how airbrush artists did work that looked as good as photos; all my work was freehand and furry edged. But after doing Stuart’s airbrush course where he teaches you all the tricks, I’m now doing portraits that actually look good enough to sell. My flames too, are so realistic they look fantastic.

The course starts with the basics — airbrush cleaning, etc, before Stuart gives us a lesson on dots… yes, dots, and then lines… dots and lines — five rows of five dots and then join them together with lines. Yes, it does sound a bit strange, but it gives you control over the airbrush and teaches you when to start and stop lines and how to judge distance and colour.

After doing this lesson, when I pick up my brush now, I have doubled my control and can do a straight line with ease. My freehand skulls now look crisp and I can add different facial expressions easier. I have even done some great portraits of my kids that I am stoked with.

Next we were taught how to use skull templates. Basically, you spray through these to paint the perfect skull, then using the airbrush, you do the edges to blend it in. We were also taught how to make our own stencil and masking. We actually used a piece of normal printer paper to make a stencil of Mel Gibson to do his portrait. They all turned out pretty good too.

For most of the students, in one lesson they went from never picking up an airbrush to painting a portrait of Mel Gibson, and I didn’t see one disappointed student; in fact, we were all stoked that Stuart had turned us in geniuses.

Lesson Two is even better but you will have to wait until next month for my report… see ya then.

STUART VIMPANI has helped hundreds of people around the world develop their own airbrushing business. His courses are exclusive and are only run a few times a year. If you’d like to know more, visit Airbrushing Made Easy