Testors Amazing Air Airbrush Paint Set

After going through all the hand painting for the structures on my nursery wall layout, I thought it would be a good idea to try out some airbrushing. I didn't want to get too involved in it without trying it out first, so I asked for and received a Testors Amazing Air airbrush beginner kit for my birthday a few months back. Here is a look at what the kit included:

Testors Amazing Air airbrush paint set

It's a pretty basic system with a plastic air sprayer that connects to a canister of propellant. The paint is fed in through a small plastic tube and cap right to the end of the sprayer. I don't really know anything about airbrushing, at least not yet, but this doesn't seem so bad to me. I'm sure there will be a learning curve, but that's half the fun of learning something new like this, especially something I can use for all kinds of things when it comes to model railroading.

So far I've been doing a bit of playing around with it and I like the results so far. I have an old Athearn Soo Line SD40-2 that's pretty beat up and missing a few parts, so I thought it would make a good candidate for my first loco repaint. Here's what it looked like before doing any airbrushing to it. 

An old Athearn Soo Line SD40-2 as my test locomotive

Before I started any painting I made myself a quick paint booth out of an old cardboard box. It didn't need to be fancy, just something to keep paint from getting everywhere. In the next picture you'll be able to see this and some of the yellow I tried out on the SD40-2. I even threw some blue painters tape on there to see how it would work. If I'm going to try and customize my own locos someday, I'll have to find a good way to use multiple colors and this seemed like a good place to start. 

My simple cardboard paint booth and some trial painting

You can also see an orange box car in the above picture. That is actually the old San Jose Sharks boxcar I showed off on the blog a while back. It didn't come out as well as the loco, but I think that's just because I was still trying to figure out what the heck I was doing with this whole process. 

Not sure what else I will try to do with the SD40-2, maybe throw on some of the remaining red and blue paint that came with the set. After all, this is basically a throw away locomotive so I will get as much use out of it as I can as a test subject.