My latest airbrushing video came about because of the 5000 Subscriber Contest miniature - the Celestant Prime. The base has that swirly effect with the shooting stars and gold... things floating around in it and even though I knew I was going to change the colors from what the studio version had, I did like the idea of having this visible starfield as part of the coloration.
The last time I did a star field it was the cloaking effect on X-Wing minis. The stars sort of represent the ability to now see through the cloaked part of the ship. Since it was so small I did it with a brush. I now wish that I had thought of this technique when I was working on those projects. Of course, the swirly base is a LOT bigger than TIE Interceptors so the last thing I wanted to do was to dot 1000 little stars with a brush. I remembered that it was possible to do spatter with an airbrush - I even knew HOW to do it, but I'd never actually done it on a project (on purpose). What was great was seeing that it took very little effort to get the spatter dialed in the way I wanted it to look and then actually applying it was also pretty easy. I look forward to trying this out again on another project. I'm tempted to do another cloaking project just so I can bring my starfield game up a notch on one of those projects.
As or the video... for some reason I kept using the phrase "crank it up". I don't know if I use that a lot in general conversation but it's really inappropriate for what I'm talking about in the video because in making changes to set the pressure to get different spatter effects the changes are actually very minute. You would never "crank" anything. You would carefully adjust the pressure up or down by 1-2 pounds and then see if the change is what you wanted. Sometimes my mouth opens and things spill out for no apparent reason.
This is a really simple technique that SHOULD be possible with any airbrush. My Iwata CMB makes a point to say that it can do it in its marketing material, but I think that it might just be particularly good at it - but until I replace my tip for it I won't be able to try.