Airbrush Lesson 5 – Practicing Your Airbrushing Skills

Airbrush lesson five will be another practice painting where you’ll need to use all airbrushing skills that we learned in the first four lessons, we’ll also make our own stencils. Written by Don Johnson

Here in this airbrush lesson I’m again going to keep it very simple and fully expect you to out shine me here with your finished painting. I will show you the very basics of this simple painting, it’s up to you to take it a step further by adding different colors etc.

Here are all 5 Airbrush Basic Lessons

• Airbrush Lesson 1 – How to hold and use airbrush
• Airbrush Lesson 2 – Dots and Lines
• Airbrush Lesson 3 – Practicing your Shading Skills
• Airbrush Lesson 4 – Using Dagger Strokes
• Airbrush Lesson 5 – Practicing Your Airbrushing Skills

Airbrush Supplies Required:

Once again we will be using news print as we did in lesson one and the color black. Please remember to use good airbrush ready paints like DR PH Martins or Golden Airbrush colors, Createx Illustration Paint. For this lesson you’ll also need a piece of thin cardboard and the top off a rattle can of paint.

Step 1– Taking our piece of cardboard, cut the out line or rolling hills or mountains. Do so using the bottom one third of the card board leaving two thirds above the rolling hills, mountains. This get more jagged mountain peaks you can also tear the card board as opposed to using scissors like I’m doing above.

Step 2 – Now take your home made free hand shield and hold it against the news print about in the middle of the page.

Step 3 – Apply a thin layer of color spraying half on the free hand shield and half on the newsprint. Bring your rolling hills, mountains down below the cardboard defining one hill, mountain being in front of the others.

Step 4 – Moving the free hand shield up the page place some hills, mountains behind the your first row of hills, mountains you just created. Just a light mist of color no need to apply a bunch of color rendering a real hard outline here.

Step 5 – Now with two rows of hills or mountains we will go in to further define the shapes using very thin lines to out the hills or mountains.

Step 6 – Starting with the hill, mountain that will be in the back ground of your painting we will add some shading to help create the look of depth to our painting.

Step 7 – While adding this shading please keep in mind which direction your light source (the moon or sun) will be affecting the hills, mountains from. In this case the sun or moon will be coming up behind them

Step 8 – Continue to define the hills, mountains by applying nice even shading creating depth in your painting. Nice even tone to the color, no hard lines at this point.

Step 9 – To control over spray keep your airbrush directed down into the hills, mountains avoiding a lot of over spray up into the sky area.Make sure you follow the contour of the hill, mountain as we did in airbrush lesson two with the sphere.

Step 10 – Its time now to use the top off the rattle can of paint to create your moon or sun.

Step 11– Place your can top at the top of the hills, mountains about in the middle of them. Apply a nice light even layer of color around the can top that extends above the mountains, hills. Do not follow the out line of the can top down into the mountains.

Step 12 – There you have it our nice round moon or sun which ever you prefer to call it.

Step 13 – Now we will make a very simple free hand shield to add some trees to our little painting. Draw three triangles one top of another. The top triangle being the smallest and getting bigger as you draw the triangles below that. Use a craft knife to cut the out line of the trees out.

Step 14 – Now as we did with our hill or mountain, free hand template hold the tree template at the bottom of the hills, mountains add a little color.

Step 15 – Move your tree template a little to the right or left and apply some color.

Step 16 – Try and keep in mind not all trees grown straight its fine to angel some of them by just turning the template a little.

Step 17 – Move the template down away from the hills, mountains and use the amount of color you apply to add depth to your painting as we did with the mountains, hills. The trees in the back ground would be lighter color than the trees in the fore ground.

Step 18 – Now to complete our simple painting we will go back and add a little more shading within or forest, hills, mountains.

Step 19 – There you have it your second completed painting. I’m sure you can add a lot to this simple painting and hope you have fun with it.

Below is the video version of the above airbrush lesson.