[sparky00]

The Badger website & manuals has some good exercises for learning to control the airbrush. There are also good intro videos on youtube.

For practice, I'd recommend getting some Createx airbrush paint & thinner. Its decent size and cheap.

Since you will be painting on plastic, its good to see how the paint will behave on plastic. Plastic yard sale signs are good, flat surfaces to practice on. You can prime them and see how the paint behaves over primer.

Most paints you use will need some thinning. How much really depends on the individual paint. With practice, you will develop a "feel" for how paint flows through the brush, and how much thinning you need to get the flow you are looking for. The Patriot 105 seems pretty forgiving in this regard. Roughly 50/50 is good initial starting point.

I recommend using a thinner or airbrush medium from the same manufacturer as the paint. I do. Lots of these paints probably have tweaked chemistry, and may not play well with others.

I'd also stress the value of practice exercises. Double-action airbrushes are not the easiest thing to control initially, but can give excellent results with a little experience and skill. Painting the dots, curves, lines and dagger strokes in the exercises may not seem applicable to minis, but learning to control the brush well will result in much less frustration when you load it with paint and point it at your minis.