As part of our business we travel a lot doing events for Companies, Colleges, private events etc… sometimes that will require flying as opposed to driving. To do this we have had to learn how to condense what we need at an event so that it will be easy to transport everything on an airplane.

Do you need time off? Are you busy enough that you need help with your airbrushing? Have you ever wanted to hire someone to help you airbrush but did not know how to train a new artist?

We get asked a lot “how do we train our artists? “ Over the past 30+ years we have trained over 100 artists to work with us. Artists for our studio locations, waterpark

This is one of those questions that is difficult for artists to find the answer, or at least an answer that is “one size fits all”. This is because there is no such thing. Since “art is subjective” so is the price of the art and so there can not be a formula that covers every artist.

Let's talk Uniforms.  I know, I know,  you’re an artist,  you don’t want to wear a uniform.  You want to wear whatever you want in your studio. Well that's all fine for those of you that work by yourself in a home studio and not out in the general public….

With the pandemic all but behind us at the writing of this post, and all of us experiencing prices being raised on everything from milk to cars. It made me think that it may be time to discuss the issue as it relates to the retail airbrush industry.

As with many of the other topics on this blog. This subject is a little touchy because “artists” hate the ”business” aspect of airbrushing, and controlling your prices when it comes to the market, your competition and your own financial prosperity is a big part of running your business.

We are going to focus mostly on prices of “standard designs” and “Semi-Custom” designs like

After 2 years and a full worldwide pandemic, this blog post is well over due.

This is a continuation of our 3 part series “Transitioning from Brick and Mortar to Online and Events”…so I guess you could say this is “Part 4”…lol.. If you haven’t already read the first 3 posts we encourage you to do so to make it easier to follow this post.

When we last left you in January of 2020 with part 3 we had taken a “temporary” location in one of the other local malls in the Cincinnati area “Liberty Center” mall. We had signed up for the Christmas season of 2019 simply because as explained in part 3 of this series we were simply losing so much money from

For us, Halloween has become one of the most busy money makers we would never have imagined. I know, I know… what does “Halloween Make-up” have to do with running an airbrush shop? Well, on the surface it has nothing to do with it, but if you take a minute and explore further you will discover that the airbrush and the makeup industry have a lot in common. With the rising popularity of make-up shows such as Face Off and Skin Wars which feature the use of the airbrush in doing special effects makeup. These shows and others like them have just pushed the airbrush into yet one more “main stream” segment of society that has allowed artists who are willing to apply this to their business to take advantage of yet another money maker.

So here is one of the more controversial topics in the airbrush industry. Are Airbrush artists Employees or are they Independent Contractors(self employed)? It’s controversial because everyone has their own opinion and hence decide to “interrupt” the IRS guidelines in their favor.

“Independent contractor vs Employee” is an extremely “Gray” area as far as the IRS is concerned. These two links below are the most important thing anyone can read who is considering hiring someone or is being hired by someone who is paying as a “Independent Contractor”. I highly suggest that everyone in these two situations read them COMPLETELY. You will see for yourself that they lean towards…

UpDated 12-21-21:

With the recent passing of Terry Hill (yet another icon in the airbrush industry). It seemed like a good time to bring up this blog post which pertains to the future of the airbrush industry. The question?…”What are you doing to bring new life and talent into the airbrush industry?”

Mr. Hills passing leaves a giant hole in the industry. While nobody will ever be able to fill Mr. Hills shoes as they pertain to the contributions he has given our industry over the past few decades. Eventually, the industry will need to compensate for this loss and continue with the help of a new generation of artists.

Let me start off by saying this is basically just an “opinion” piece. There is no scientific data to back up anything said in this post…just personal research and mostly observation. So take this article as just a fun read with possibly something to think about.

The one factor however that I think very few people could or would oppose is the fact that there are a lot less airbrush artists today (that are actually doing this as a living) then there was in the 80’s,90’ and early 2000’s and the …..

This is part three of a 3 part blog on one airbrush studios process of transitioning from a Brick and Mortar store to doing Online sales and Events. We will talk about what it was like closing our Retail location after almost 30 years of Brick and Mortar stores and the challenges that came along with learning how to navigate the world of having an online business and combining it with an events business…neither of which require an actual public location.

In this post we will cover the problems we faced with not having a physical location after almost 30 years in the same city. We will also go through the steps we took and the different avenues we explored in searching for a new Physical Location.

This is part two of a 3 part blog on one airbrush studios process of transitioning from a Brick and Mortar store to doing Online sales and Events. We will talk about what it was like closing our Retail location after almost 30 years of Brick and Mortar stores and the challenges that came along with learning how to navigate the world of having an online business and combining it with an events business…neither of which require an actual public location.

In this post we will discuss the Online portion of the Transition….lets get started…

So…..we’ve closed our retail location, we built a website with online store and we have started getting online orders. So what was the process like getting here?

First things first…building the website. How did we choose what website builder to use? We looked into Godaddy.com, wix.com, squarespace.com, and even hiring a web designer. We settled on Squarespace.com. Not for any one particular reason, we just felt it was easy enough for all of us to be able to grasp and from a business side it was in a price range that I was comfortable with.

This is part one of a 3 part blog on one airbrush studios process of transitioning from a Brick and Mortar store to doing Online sales and Events. We will talk about what it was like closing our Retail location after almost 30 years of Brick and Mortar stores and the challenges that came along with learning how to navigate the world of having an online business and combining it with an events business…neither of which require an actual public location.

So lets dive right in….

First, this is an article that I never thought I would be writing, simply because I never thought we would be without a Brick and Mortar location. However in February 2019, after almost 30 years, we closed our Mall location to transition into doing online orders and to concentrate on the Airbrush Entertainment Events part of the business as well as continue operate our Waterpark location. We are basically testing the waters on not having an actual year round location. It did not turn out the way we thought it would so keep reading to learn some good lessons.

The two main reasons for closing the retail location were that the mall we were in was suffering and also, it was time to come to grips with the effect

This is the third post of a series of 3 on Advertising and Promoting your Airbrush Business. Visit the other two posts…Radio and Live Promotional advertising and Social Media and Printed Promotional Material to learn more about simple things you can do to help get your name out there.

n this post we are going to deal with how one goes about getting into your local newspapers and on your local TV news shows which doesn’t cost you anything!…. Ok…. well…maybe not anything. It actually is going to cost you, an artist, one of the hardest things that an artist has to deal with…NOT being shy! That’s right, you heard me, it’s time to come out of that shell that to many artists hide inside of and just watch as the world walks by and doesn’t even notice them.

This is the second post of a series of 3 on Advertising and Promoting your Airbrush Business. Visit the other two posts… How to get free Print and TV exposure and Social Media and Printed Promotional Material to learn more about simple things you can do to help get your name out there.

The first thing I want to emphasize on this post is that this is all about getting FREE or extremely low cost advertising through Radio and Live Promotions.

For us, our venture into the world of Radio all started with a crush….that’s right a love crush….lol…Going way back in our history to circa 1992, one of our artists Dave, had a huge crush on the traffic reporter from one of Cincinnati’s local country radio stations. Her radio name was Coyote Kim. So Dave had the brilliant idea of doing her a special shirt and taking it down to the station and

This is the first post of a series of 3 on Advertising and Promoting your Airbrush Business. Visit the other two posts… How to get free Print and TV exposure and Radio and Live Promotional advertising to learn more about simple things you can do to help get your name out there.

Advertising is another question that comes up a lot when talking with other airbrush business owners. It is also one of the things that most artists fail to do on a regular basis and then wonder why they are not getting any customers. We all have that big dream of opening our first store and just waiting for the big rush of people to find us. As if somehow, magically, everyone in the city knows that there is a new airbrush shop in town. As in the movie “Field of Dreams”….”build it and they will come”…lol…well…I’m sorry to say that it doesn’t quite happen that way…lol… In reality its more like “TELL them you have built it and they will come”.

So how about window displays? For those of you with store windows, what kind of things have you done? Window displays are the bain of my existence, I really hate having to re-do the window displays from season to season and holiday to holiday. I usually love the final results, but just getting the motivation to do them is very hard.

Promotional items

Here is a quick little post about some promotional items we hand out at Anything Airbrushed plus. In the picture you will see…

What Kind of shop are you?
What kind of shop do you want to be?

These are two questions that while most airbrush artists never actually bother to ask themselves , they are two questions that are usually on the back of the minds of most airbrush artists that become business owners. The ironic thing is that once you cross the line to becoming a business owner they are questions that you really should ask yourself. These two questions are actually the key to any good business plan. "What do I want my business to be"?

Why do most airbrush places and t-shirt places in general have a separate price on the artwork/design and a separate price on the blank item?….why not make it all one price? 

To start with, the main thinking behind why we price artwork separate from item goes back to the basics of retail “Bait the customer with a lower price so the can’t say NO once they already fell in love with the item”

Now I don’t want anyone to miss understand this as being a deceptive sales ploy, on the contrary it’s all psychological.

A customer walks in and sees a design they absolute love and on that design it says “$12 artwork" (or something similar)…most customers have a tendency to think that is how much the entire shirt is….and this is OK….you want them to fall in love with the design so much that once they realize they have to pay extra for the shirt they don’t care because they already made up their mind that they want it.

One of the more controversial subjects in owning a retail airbrush studio is the subject of the Service Charge. Some artist charge a fee for customers who bring in an item for them to paint and some do not.

What follows applies to you if…..

1.) You are operating a “retail location” like a mall store, flea market, or free standing store front in a "non-tourist trap" area.

2.) you are operating a business that has at least one other artist working for you.

….however it also has a lot of information that a “one man opperation” could also consider

(While anyone with a location in a tourist trap area or an amusement park location can also learn a lot from this, it may not all apply to such locations simply because of foot traffic/quantity of orders).

So….Why a service charge?