Model paint?

My daughter is working on a design to be airbrushed (by herself) on our airplane's v-stab. The base will be standard white urethane, probably PPG.

I have a pretty good Testors airbrush, which works well for both gross and fine work. However, I don't know about the paint. Will enamel work over non-clearcoat urethane, and if not, what paint will work both in the airbrush and on the surface?

Enamel will work on most any kind of paint. However once set up, urethane is practically non-porous. You will need to "scuff it up" to get anything to stick well.
The trick to overcoating urethane is to do it before it is set up.

Custom Paint

House of kolor makes custom paints and colors for airbrushing, striping, flames and complete base coat systems. You can call their tech line. They can help you. They have airbrush paint kits with a bunch of custom colors to choose from in almost any paint "system" you want (acrylic lacquer, urethane enamel, epoxy polyurethane). Tell them what your base coat is and they get you what you need. You want to get fancy they have pearls, flakes, metallic and different clear coat effects. Also they have DVD's and books on airbrushing.

http://www.houseofkolor.com/hok/index.jsp

Here is a page for their air brush products: http://www.houseofkolor.com/hok/news/HOKairbrush.jsp

Here is a down load of their catalog: http://www.houseofkolor.com/hok/products/pdf/F06ProductCatalog.pdf

Just guessing here

But if you don't know the exact extent of the artwork I would suggets that you could scuff the whole surface with 1200 or maybe 1000Grit paper do the artwork within a couple of days then clearcoat the whole thing.

Frank

frankh said:

But if you don't know the exact extent of the artwork I would suggets that you could scuff the whole surface with 1200 or maybe 1000Grit paper do the artwork within a couple of days then clearcoat the whole thing.

Frank

Click to expand...

We have a very good idea of the dimensions, so I'll probably just mark out the area and scuff it, mask off the rest, and turn her loose.

Also, George and Mel, thanks for the as-usual good advice.

House of Color's a good one but I took an airbrush class not long ago in which we used "Auto-Air Colors" for our project. Some Car Quest automotive suppliers carry it. The nice thing about this stuff is it's water born and once dry, two or three minutes, the only thing other than sand paper that will remove it is amonia (windex is strong enough). It's designed for air brush. If it's to be permanant it requires a clear coat.


By the way the URL below takes you to Mickey Harris' web site. He taught the class I was in.

http://www.mickeyharrisart.com/