Break Out the Airbrush, Baby!

Hi All,

I just came across a picture of Jimi Hendrix that I airbrushed on a black t-shirt years ago.  It brought back a lot of memories.  Back in a "previous lifetime" when I was a medical illustrator at the regional hospital at Carswell AFB, Texas, I had a textile airbrushing biz.  I would airbrush tees, jackets, and other stuff at home in my studio during the week, and set up and paint tees on-site at the Cattle Barn Flea Market every other weekend.  The flea marked managers where great...they'd keep a spot for me by the front doors.  It was a lot of fun...Good times.

Tee shirt artwork....Jimi Hendrix portrait on a black tee shirt - with airbrush acrylic paints

I really had fun with this shirt (photo above).  Because it's on a black tee, it's painted with just hi-lights and purple haze in the background.  A fun technique and a little more challenging than the standard paint on white tee.

I started out learning the Airbrush from Michael Casey at a DGEF workshop in Peoria, IL.  Not long after I started experimenting with textile airbrushing.  For me, I wear tee shirts quite a bit, I appreciated the art form, and it just seemed like a natural medium for me to pursue.

I still have an arsenal of guns (airbrushes) for different uses.  For t-shirts I always loved the Paasche VL.  It's a bottom feed brush that allows you to keep several colors in bottles ready so can just pop em on and off for easy color change.  Thru reading Airbrush Action magazine - I learned a couple tricks to modify the guns; customizing them for textile painting.  My paint of choice for textiles are Createx acryic colors.  The pioneers of tee shirt airbrushing would talk about the different silk screen inks, paints, and other mediums they'd use, but by the time I came along Createx already had a great line of products made for airbrushing textiles.  The great thing about Createx is that they're non-toxic paints made for airbrushing.  However, you still need good ventilation and I had a mask that I'd wear to help keep paint out of my lungs.

Of course, as the years have gone by the popularity of airbrushing has declined and I don't use the airbrushes nearly as much as I used to.  However, I still use airbrush for fine art and occasional illustration projects.  I use it mostly as a supplemental tool to add smooth tones.  Most of the time now I use the airbrush tool in Photoshop more than any manual brush (most commercial work I do is illustrated on computer now).

 The Batgirl picture(on the right) is a mixed media project that I used the airbrush to enhance.  I did it for fun and practice many years ago, but it's a great example of using the airbrush on a fine art/illustration piece.  It's a great tool to add tonal values, especially in the folds of fabrics.

Have a great week all.....get out those air brushes once in a while and have some fun with them...they get lonely on the shelf.