How to Paint Red - Airbrush vs Drybrush

The Goal

Today we’re going to recreate that Mangler Squig box art—speed paint style—using an airbrush. And if you don’t have an airbrush, I’m also going to show you how to do the same thing with just dry brushing.

Starting Point

These are primed black and hit from the top with rattle can white. I didn’t spend a ton of time on that since some people might not have an airbrush for zenithal.

The Airbrush Method

Purple Preshade

Starting with Hex Lyken (a deep but bright purple), spraying up from the bottom as a reverse highlight.

Brown Foundation

Then Burnt Umber—the best brown ever made. If we go straight from white to red, it turns pink. From black to red, it becomes maroon. This brown lets the red come through properly.

Building the Red

Primary Red from Scale Color, coming in from the top and bottom. Scale Color is actually pretty hard to airbrush with. And this Badger just chucks paint out—I’m barely touching the button.

Magenta Shadows

Too much paint came out, so I grabbed magenta ink to reestablish those purple shadows from the bottom up.

Orange Highlights

Tangerine ink at the very top. Look at the box art—they’re actually very orange.

The Drybrush Method

I’m keeping all the footage here so you can see I’m just blasting this thing. It’s not even really a dry brush—there’s tons of paint. Using a soft bristle dry brush so we don’t get brush strokes.

Same Layers

1. Hex Lyken purple in the shadows—hitting from the bottom
2. Burnt Umber on the white parts, overlapping into the purple
3. Red building up traditionally, way more paint than a normal dry brush
4. Orange highlights with yellow ochre ink

On Volumetric Painting

I’m probably going to get crucified for this, but I think high-contrast dynamic volumetric painting looks goofy on the tabletop with a whole army. It looks great in competition models and one-offs, but when you have a whole army in that style on the table, in the real world, it looks cartoonish to me.

If you want that style, just don’t take the red as far into the purple.

The Magic: Purple Oil Wash

This ties everything together. Very cheap violet paint from Walmart mixed with mineral spirits—very thin.

On the dry brushed one, there were still white spots where I couldn’t reach with my thick brush. This wash unifies all of that. It turns those areas purple and creates an optical illusion at tabletop level that blends all the colors together.

Use a makeup sponge (not a sprue sponge—it can scratch). Stipple it off, being gentle. We want to tint the shadows that purple color and unify everything.

The Results

After the wash, you really can’t tell which was airbrush and which was drybrush. They look almost exactly the same.

Total time for both models: 66 minutes from sitting down, including getting up for paints and supplies. If you were just doing one method, probably 20 minutes each.

Tomorrow we paint the details and really kick this up to the next level with all the time we saved by easy-moding the skin.