Paint sputtering
UPDATE: ok so everyone has validated my concerns that I wasn't thinning my paints properly, thank you for that. As I explained in the comments I was following a couple of YouTube tutorials for thinning out your paints and the general advice was that your paints should slide down the sides of the cup fairly quickly and leave a thin non transparent film. And yes I know about the milk consistency. Apparently I'm just not good at determining what's milk consistency. I thought I got it but oh well, have to try again. Thank you for your help. I got this cheap no name 20$ single action airbrush a month ago and it has been such a struggle to set it up. I genuinely haven't gotten any progress with it after messing with it for 20+ hours. I've read every troubleshooting advice ever, thinned my paints to watery consistency, to milky consistency, to every other possible consistency and put them in just as is. I clean out tip dry with a toothbrush and alcohol every minute, but nothing seems to work. I deep clean it every 5 minutes because it just keeps getting clogged or something. It's so frustrating, I hate this. The best spray pattern I've gotten so far is grainy, but blurry in the middle. Still, it leaves a very bizzare texture and I don't think it should (shown at the end of the video, painted on a perfectly smooth sanded surface). I have only tried using irridescent acrylic paints and normal acrylic paints, but those are 3 years old. I thinned out both of these paints with either distilled water or acrylic thinner. I'm really so confused whether it's user error or the fault of a cheap airbrush. It sprays water just fine after deep cleaning. In the video I show my paint consistency (there is no way this is too thick?) and I change the pressure using the cog at the rear tip of the airbrush. I don't even know if it affects the spray pattern, because it just increases the trigger's resistance to the pull, but as you can see in the video it doesn't do anything for the spray pattern. After filming the video I switched paints to distilled water without deep cleaning and it wasn't spraying anything, I assume because it was clogged, however I had deep cleaned the airbrush and switched out paints not even 3 minutes before filming. I think I should just get a pack of paints specifically for airbrushing and try them out because maybe my paints are bad or I'm not thinning them out correctly.