As @avernos says practise with just water playing with the settings and seeing how adjustments change the fan and coverage an in no time you will be preaching about how good spray guns are. dont forget thin coats are better than runs.

Am I too late to say practice with water?

spray onto a sheet of paper/newspaper rather than a mini until you get comfortable with things

Watering down paint is a good idea as its the same thing that you’d do with regular brushwork. For me I go with Vallejo Flow Improver and have been happy with results over their paint thinner. The former doesn’t end up clogging like the latter does when put in the airbrush.

As far as brands I’d say look Vallejo Air if you wanted directly engineered paint but the info floating around these boards, as well as some Golden Button winners, has been that inks really work. A basic black paint and then a white ink zenithal works awesome. Be sure to gloss coat over the primer step so the colors stay true in value. Trust me on making the mistake of not doing that. It might give you good results for mixing on the fly is you were to put in a retarder and then spray in subtle highlights/shading.

While I’m not keen on the presentation in the by Next Level Painting for the persona but he’s got good info. Luke on the other hand is down to earth and gives even more to try and save some money. Here’s my contribution for what has helped me.

Aye, primer is just good sticky paint to get a starting layer for more paint to stick to. Airbrush primer is just a flowwy primer so you can, theoretically, use it straight from the bottle. Vallejo does good ones either their airbrush or mecha range work well but the 2nd half of the bottle will want thinning a bit as you get through it.

You can use a brush on primer if you thin it a bit, I use a mix of 2pt water : 1pt vallejo airbrush cleaner for thinning everthing in the airbrush, and have a practice spray. DON’T just have the 1st layer on a model be an airbrushed NON-primer as it’s just too thin and not stuck well, it’ll chip and flake. There’s also no reason why if you have a favourite rattle can primer you don’t just prime with that and airbrush the layers.

Very well done pieces. Priming is forgiving and with the right layers are never too thick to obscure details.

Now that you’re doing pieces like this and have stuff to weather here’s some mote info.