Airbrush Lesson: Simple American Flag

For this airbrush lesson I'll show you how I painted the flag shown above. It's a really simple flag that shows the technique of layering transparent paints.

For this project you will need the following:

• your airbrush equipment
• red, blue and black TRANSPARENT paints
• masking tape
• exacto knife
• pencil
• scrap paper
• a surface to paint on

Scroll down when you are ready to start!

Step 1

To start, use the masking tape to make a border around your painting surface - this won't work without the border. Also, using a pencil, very lightly draw some diagonal lines on your surface to guide where the flags folds are going to go.

Step 2

To achieve the nice soft lines in the folds of the flag, loosely fold a piece of scrap paper so that it has a round edge and place it along side of one of your very light diagonal pencil marks.

Step 3

Using heavily reduced black transparent paint (dilute either with water or reducer) lightly spray the scrap paper as shown below, letting the overspray fall onto your painting surface. In the photo below, I have made a line on the paper indicating where I am aiming the spray.

Step 4

When you remove the paper it should look something like this...

Step 5

Repeat the process on all the folds of the flag. Also, to give a bit more dimension, lightly spray some reduced transparent black paint in the "valleys" of each fold.

Step 6

Using masking tape, apply your first stripe from one side of the flag to the other.

This is where this airbrush lesson gets a tad confusing - so pay attention :)

Where ever one of the folds touches the tape make a little marks as shown below.

Step 7

Why make the marks, you ask?? Because we're going to use the exacto knife to cut the stripes at each of these points and offset the tape as shown below.

Step 8

Keep laying stripe after stripe, cutting and offsetting each one where it touches the fold marks. When you have all the stripes in it will look like this.

Step 9

Use a pencil (or a marker) to draw in some stars and the blue area of the flag. Use the exacto knife to cut all the drawn lines (but don't remove them yet)

Step 10

ALRIGHT! We're getting closer to the exciting parts of this airbrush lesson!!

It is time to remove some stripes! If the offsetting of the tape didn't make sense before, this should clear it up.

Oh, I should also mention, that this design looks best if the top and bottom stripes are red (as opposed to white) as it frames the work better

Step 11

Before we start coloring the stripes - we need to take out a little insurance.

To make sure that our white stripes don't end up with red lines through them, use little bits of tape to cover up the seams of each of your offsets.

Step 12

Now spray all the exposed areas with red transparent paint. Don't panic when it looks pink.... just keep spraying.... the color will deepen. Just layer it slowly as not to saturate your painting surface.

Step 13

Remove all the tape except the stars....

Step 13

.... then isolate the blue area with tape and scrap paper. Take every precaution necessary to protect your work from the blue overspray - blue seems to get everywhere for some reason.

Then spray the exposed area with transparent blue paint. Again, go slow and let the color deepen as you apply layers.

Step 14

.... remove all the tape and VOILA .... one completed flag.

Hope you enjoyed this airbrush lesson!