How to make an airbrush to paint at home like a professional

An airbrush is a small pressure paint gun, used to quickly paint surfaces with a very even and shiny finish, or to make very precise strokes of different sizes. It is used for very diverse jobs: crafts, carpentry, portraits, works of art, makeup, model airplanes, and any task that requires careful painting.

One of its advantages is that you can fill it with the paint you want, even with natural paints made at home, and that, unlike methods such as aerosols (which are also much more expensive), it is not polluting, because it does not have gases tablets inside.

Below you can learn how to build your own homemade airbrush to use in all your projects that require painting. In addition, you can do it with cheap materials that you surely have at home, like a disused pen!

– A used pen or pencil

– A rubber hose

– A small, soft plastic jar with its lid (you have to be able to squeeze it, so it cannot be rigid)

– silicone

– Insulating tape

– Paint

– Water or thinner, depending on which paint you are going to use

1. Remove the ink tube from the pen, being careful not to break it. You will be left with two tubes, the outer rigid plastic, and the inner one, which the ink ran through.

2. Attach the open mouth of the outer tube of the pen to a small piece of rubber hose. Fix it with insulating tape being careful that there is no air leak between them.

3. Pierce the lid of the plastic bottle, and pass the inner tube of the pen through the perforation, sealing it with silicone so that air does not escape. If your jar is short, you may need to cut the tube.

4. Finally, as you can see in the images, hold the outer tube of the pen, and the bottle with the paint outlet, so that they are very close to each other, so that you can make air and paint come out at the same time through both openings.

To use it:

You must load the diluted paint into the jar, and cover it with the lid that should already be attached to the airbrush. Then, to make it come out, you have to squeeze the bottle and, at the same time, blow through the hose or, if you want it to come out with more pressure, you can add an air compressor to its end.

In commercial airbrushes, the paint and the air arrive at the same time, at the same outlet, through different channels. In this case, what you will achieve is to disperse the paint with air, immediately after it comes out of the jar.

In the following video, you can see how to build a different model, somewhat more complicated to put together, but also more accurate.

And in the next one, you will be able to learn how to start painting with this type of paint gun, if you have never done it before.

Go ahead and do this project!