help needed

[wingers]

I've finally got around to airbrushing my first shell and it’s not gone well!
I’ve got some ideas as to what some of the problems were but others I'm not so sure so I’m after some advice.

The first problem was the paint being blown around the surface of the shell (is that “spidering”?). This got much worse if I held the airbrush closer, but seemed just about manageable if I held it 15cm or more away from the shell. That was a sort of work-around but I can’t see how any detail work could be completed from that distance so there must be a better way. I guessed that the pressure might be too high so tried reducing it (to less than 20psi) to stop it happening but ended up with lots of large paint droplets coming off the nozzle. I think that’s because the pressure was too low, so I think there must be another problem causing the spidering instead. I also tried reducing the airflow to help stop the spidering, but that only seemed to make the “blobbing” worse.

Another interesting point was that I had to open the nozzle as far as it would go to get any reasonable amount of paint onto the shell. Again this seems odd, and may be a clue as to where I’m going wrong?

I'm using Faskolor paint with a 0.25mm airbrush and sprayed black first (without any real problems) then red, silver, white. The silver and white were by far the worst but red also suffered a little.
I haven’t tried thinning the paint at all but the thicker paints (black) seemed to flow better than the thinner ones (white) so I’m doubtful of that being the right thing to do.

What is a good distance to be spraying from? Looking at some designs that I’ve seen on here I would expect it to be a couple of cm for the detail work, further back for general colour filling.

Wingers