Dark Angels Nephilim Jetfighter - Airbrushing Progress

Apologies for the lack of activity recently. I've spent a couple of long weekends in Ireland with the in-laws and it feels rude to sit there blogging! Anyway, hopefully I'll get back up to speed this week.

You may recall that I recently picked up an airbrush set from eBay. In my first airbrushing post I showed the kit I picked up and my early efforts with it. You can view it here. The first thing I tried was to simply basecoat a vehicle with it to see how even the coverage was, play around with paint consistencies and try my hand at masking. I was fairly pleased with the results but the main thing was that I learned a lot about how to use the airbrush.

We've recently played a 3,000pt battle of Angels of Death (BA/DA) against the forces of Chaos and I wanted to use this an excuse to get my DA painted up. This gave me an opportunity to try my hand at "blending" with the airbrush. I use the inverted commas because it isn't the same kind of process as wet blending with a regular paintbrush. When you see the images of the Nephilim Jetfighter it often features a white to blue fade effect on the wings, as you can see below in the image taken from GW's site:

Now, I'm sure there was probably an article on the GW website claiming this was done using wet blending but having tried it out with my airbrush I'm convinced the Eavy Metal team must've used an airbrush too. Anyway, I mixed up some Calgar Blue with Ceramite White to create a pale sky blue colour. This was then liberally sprayed over the wings of the flyer. Once this had tried I thinned down some pure white and simply sprayed it over the top taking care to only apply a minimal amount over the wing "tips". That's it. Simple as that. Here's what the flyer looked like after those two coats:

I then carefully painted the black back in around the newly sprayed area. I'm blown away by the result and how easy it was to achieve. I could've perhaps masked the white area and sprayed the black on but I didn't dare mess up my clean white wings.

Obviously the rest of the model needs a lot of work yet but needless to say this has filled me with confidence for using the airbrush so expect to see it used a lot more in my upcoming hobby work.