Let me introduce myself, Bart Webster as a proud airbrush artist from the 80’s.
I airbrushed during the last Photoshop/digital free decade, where if you wanted
a movie poster, or a record cover to jump of the shelf, it HAD to be airbrush art.
Airbrush artists provided the photorealism, colors, concepts, and stylization that
looked better than other competing mediums. In the 80’s the hard edges and
strange bluish-white highlights that defined airbrush art were considered “high
style”. Inevitably, airbrush art became oversaturated, and its style clashed with
the 90’s new digital art flavors. The end result was that for a short time the digi-
tal 90’s did to airbrush art what MTV in the 80’s did to disco music. Here is an
example of my frisket heavy 80’s art.
Bet you’re asking yourself “What does any of this have to do with Frisket free air-
brush techniques?” Well here goes, Airbrush art with its hard edges and bluish
bleached highlights is having a huge comeback, and before you go killing yourself
to rid your art of all its Frisket hard line values, JUST MAYBE you want to be a part
of the resurgence of airbrush tribute art. Hard edges and bleached blue highlights
in your masterpiece will scream “AN AIRBRUSH ARTIST WAS HERE!!!” And that’s
becoming very popular again.
If you are deeply determined to hide those pesky, hard masked edges from your
masterpiece and you hate spending half your art time cutting Frisket masks. I do
have quite a few tools to add to your arsenal. Here is my shopping list.
Use an ultra smooth illustration board (plate pressed,
hot pressed, or epoxy-resin C.S. 10 illustration board) or
smooth, sanded, gesso-layered canvas (3-5 coats). These
surfaces will allow for the best result. Spraying any me-
dia without Frisket masking means you MUST establish all
detail and edge control reductively by erasing back to the
white of the original board. (See my list of reductive tools).
The fun is that you get to draw your highlight details and
shapes using the white of the board, rather than miser-
ably masking each shape out and then trying to get the
edges to look natural. Everyone agrees cutting a Frisket
mask is more boring than watching snails sleep, so work-
ing with the right surface means you will be working intui-
tively with every airbrush/drawing tool including erasers.
This will feel much more like traditional drawing and give
you an unbelievable amount of detail control.
FRISKET FREE AIRBRUSHABLE MEDIUMS
1. LIQUID LEAD- (a fully erasable emulsified graphite grayscale acrylic fluid). Just imagine air-
brushing with pencil/charcoal tones that erase with ease. This is by far the best “frisket free”
media. (Don’t let the fact that I invented and sell this medium for profit, or the obvious self serving
bragging influence your own opinion.)
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