There are so many different ways to create artwork. In the old days, during times like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment for example, there were a few basic options for painting. You could use charcoal smudged with water, you could use watercolors which offered faint and undetailed methods of painting. These were both beautiful and widely used methods, but the most popular form of painting was undeniably the use of oil paints on canvas. With oil paints, professional artists would create portraits of aristocrats and political figures, and later on these oil paints would be applied to canvases for the purpose of landscaping scenery. If you have ever seen any of this artwork, you surely know it is breathtakingly beautiful.

Airbrushes offer an equally beautiful, yet highly evolved, method of painting. Airbrushes are some of the newest utensils in the art world today, and they can create a very lively effect. Painting with airbrushes can allow your artwork a sort of misty, moving, free-flowing style that many artists and viewers adore. When used with materials to draw straight and curved shapes, airbrushes can also be used to create highly defined lines in artwork. Basically, airbrushes are some of the most versatile tools an artist can have on hand, and perhaps that is why they are so popular today.

The way airbrushes work is through utilizing air pressure to paint. This is a small, usually metal, pen-like instrument that is often attached to a much larger piece of equipment to supply the various levels of air pressure and paint. Depending on the object you are painting and the style you would like to implement in that particular project, the artist can set the airbrushing equipment to varying levels of air pressure for a wide array of unique and aesthetically pleasing effects. As the air pressure is increased, the paint flies out at a higher speed, with many small droplets, and covers the canvas quickly and evenly. At a medium to lower air pressure, the paint is moving a little slower and usually has thicker droplets of color, yet it covers the artist’s canvas less completely. This offers the sheer look often found in paintings done with airbrushes.

Another important detail when painting with airbrushes that is actually entirely unique to this method of painting is the distance between the painter’s brush and the canvas which he or she is working on. From farther away, the brush will cover more evenly, but in a sheer manner. If the artist is close to his canvas, this will offer more intense color but may also appear splotchy. Airbrushing is a unique art form that takes a lot of time to truly master.