Drybrushing by Steve Bamford

Most modellers have a serious desire to be able to paint tiny tiny detail with the skill of a master. Little did we know the master was using a simple technique called Drybrushing. The name tells it all.....you are painting with a brush that is almost 100% dry. Let me run through this simple but very effective technique step by step.

The above photo shows the basic items you need for drybrushing and they include.

The most important part of this process is the brush. You want bristles of a very high quality. In my case I'm using a US$6 brush that is a #8 Sapphire S60 by Robert Simmons. You don't have to get this exact brush.....any decent brush will do.....a wide type brush works better.

Click on images below to see larger images.

We begin with the unpainted 1/48 Hasegawa Spitfire Mk.9 instrument panel. This instrument panel is about the size of my thumbnail. the raised detail is amazing. This kit even comes with an instrument panel decal, but I prefer the drybrushing technique.

First airbrush the panel the base colour (flat black).

Next apply your drybrushing paint to the plastic lid. I did this with a Q-Tip cotton swab....but almost anything will do....such as an eyedropper.

Gently dab into the paint...you want a very small amount of paint on your paint brush.

Remove 95% of the paint from the paint brush by wiping it on a Kleenex. Too much paint will ruin the painting you are trying to do. Too little paint is never a problem.

Take your almost dry brush and swipe it back and forth lightly across the raised detail you want to highlight. The movement of the bush is almost a quick and gentle "dusting" motion. Just pretend you're using the brush to clean some dust off the instrument panel. The goal is to highlight the raised detail.

Raised detail looks good now after being drybrushed with flat white paint.

For this instrument panel, some of the gauges have reddish brown bezels. So I masked using Blu-tac which can be found at any decent stationary store.

I drybrush my custom mixed reddish brown paint to the instrument panel bezels that are supposed to be red. For this sort of focused detail drybrushing I use a narrow brush.

A few coats of "Future" on the gauges to give them that glass look. The gauges appear black in this picture because of the Future that was applied to them. This dark black effect is caused by the Future and will stay that way. I would usually put on at least 3 coats of Future on the gauges to give them the effect of glass on the dials.

And there you have it. As a final touch you can drybrush black paint on some of the areas on the instrument panel that you'd like to be black that currently have some drybrushed paint on them (not the gauges). These areas would include a bit of touching up around the red instrument bezels. As you can see there is some red paint that has gotten on the instrument panel. You'd do this with a small brush. You can also paint any buttons etc with a fine detail brush. The Spitfire Mk.9 doesn't have white instrument bezels, but I prefer to think of this as artistic license. The white bezels make the instruments stand out. Drybrushing also works very well on screens/mesh. Give this a try....you'll enjoy the results.