Faceup Help, First step lining or airbrushing?

I don't use an airbrush, but most work-in-progress pictures I've seen from artists who use airbrush show that the blushing was done first and details/lining after. There might be some who do it the opposite way, but that's just what I've noticed!

Soft pastels can be opaque when drawn on roughly textured paper, but for faceups it's applied as a really thin layer of powder. That's why you can usually get away with applying it on top of lines. Depending on the color, it can alter the color of the lines, though. Whereas with airbrushing you're typically using acrylic paint, which is a bit more opaque even in thin coats. The opacity could vary depending on what you use to thin the paint. Some mediums are designed to retain the paint's opacity better, and some mediums are designed to make the paint into more of a glaze (translucent). Even the paints themselves are opaque or translucent. If you want to paint your lines first and do blushing after, blush with translucent paints. Usually a paint brand will have a symbol on the tube to indicate the opacity- in many cases a black filled in square means opaque, and an empty square means translucent. (Here's a page with pictures about how to read paint tubes.)

In any case, I'd say that if there are any lines you want to be a very specific color, do them last. Like if you want the eyeliner to be REALLY black, do that last. Sometimes I'll do line details, blush over them a bunch of times, then line over them again because they changed color. It's easier to paint the second time because you're basically tracing your own lines.

That's my two cents- hopefully someone who uses an airbrush will pop in with more info.

 

If you use airbrush to paint base, I think it’s better to draw eyeliner and eyebrow after airbrushing. If you use soft pastel for the base, the order doesn’t matter.