Airbrush Essentials - The Basics to Airbrushing Using Angelus Paints

What's going on guys? Dylan from De Jesus Custom Footwear here and today we're going to be walking you through some airbrush basics using Angela's paint. But before we can get into our painting we definitely need to make sure that we take the time to properly prep our shoes. I like to begin by giving a light sanding to almost any surface that I'm going to be working on since we're working with a pair of Air Force Ones today. I'm going to start off by using a 400 grit, moving into an 800 grit sandpaper, and then finishing everything off with a 1500 grit very fine sandpaper. Again the sanding is done very lightly in a circular motion. After that we're going to move into using a scotch-brite pad along with our Angela's prepare and deglazer. This is where the leather will tend to get really scuffed up and it's going to vary from pair to pair how the end result is going to look but it's definitely likely that you're going to end up with some of these gray spots peeking through. But that's okay because sometimes we got to make things ugly before we can make them pretty. Lastly we're going to pick up all of that residue left behind from the sandpaper and the scotch-brite pad with the deglazer and a cotton ball. Now we're going to move into taping off any areas that we don't want our paint to get down to such as our midsole, taping off our sock liner, our toe box, and our Nike swoosh. Now before we can move into our painting we need to make sure that our paint is airbrush ready. If you're working with a newer bottle of Angelus the paint is nearly airbrush ready especially if you're working with an airbrush that at least has a 0.5 millimeter needle. Now if you're working with some older paint that has potentially thickened up a little bit due to you leaving the cap off or if there's a chance that any residue or any clumps have formed inside that paint this is where it's going to become really important that you thin out your paint with some Angelus to thin. The closest consistency that I can compare your desired airbrush paint to is going to be somewhat similar to milk. Also make sure that you don't forget about your duller if you're going for that clean matte factory look. Now after we have this all mixed together this is where it's really important that you run your mixture directly through a strainer so that it'll pick up any of those little clumps that could potentially be left behind. This is vital to make sure that you don't end up with any clogs in your airbrush. Now a little technique that I like to use on some of my early base coats is mixing some white directly into your paint mixture. This is something that's just going to cut down on the total amount of coats it's going to take because mixing the white into your paint is really going to help give it that even surface for your final color to lie on to. Now once we have the blocking for our three colors laid out in order to make this a little bit more of a seamless blend I like to use something I call the middle bar technique. Now what this entails is mixing our two colors together at a one-to-one ratio and then we're just going to simply lay a middle bar in between where the two colors meet. And from there you're going to then take your original colors and blend those seamlessly back on to that middle bar area that you just sprayed. Now in order to clean our airbrush when we're potentially switching colors or we're done for the day I'm going to use the backflow technique by covering up the front tip of the airbrush with a towel forcing everything in the cup to circulate together and mix together really easily. You're going to want to take all of this excess spray and spray it into something like an airbrush cleaning pot. Now this is where you'll want to go back and do any of your touch-ups potentially any paint that was left behind on the midsole from your taping you can easily scrape any of this off with a toothpick. Here is also where you'll want to go back and do any of your touch-ups around the pipings of the various panels. Now that we're ready for our finisher you'll select that based off the look that you're going for. I'm going to be using the Angelus matte finisher and then we are going to run this directly through our airbrush and this is going to give us a really clean even flat finish. Thank you guys so much for tuning in hopefully you were able to take away something from today's video about how you can easily airbrush Angelus paints. Thanks for watching!