Airbrushing

I'm seriously considering getting Duff's airbrush machine at Michael's. And by "seriously considering," I mean waiting until it's not on sale and I have a 50% off coupon [Because you can't use 50% off coupons for sale items, and the airbrush is 25% off this week or something. It's silly].

I know it's not a top-of-the-line airbrush, and it's certainly not the industrial sized one at work (more about that later), but I'm thinking it would be nice for an at-home, hobbyist decorator such as myself (I guess you could call me a hobbyist decorator...I'm not exactly a pro yet but certainly not a beginner). I doubt I'll use it very much, but I really would like the practice. A well done airbrushed cake looks awesome. A poorly done air brushed cake ends up on Cake Wrecks. *shudder*

And I did play around with the airbrush machine at work, which like I said, is a heavy duty machine. Unlike the little light-weight, portable device that Duff endorses, the one I used is huge and heavy and comes in multiple parts. First you have the air compressor (?), then the air hose, then this thing  (maybe I should learn the terminology?) which might give you the ability to hook up multiple airbrushes but I couldn't figure that part out, so I just used one hose at a time. Then the air brush part has a little tub for you to fill with color, and that's where the fun comes in! I hope my explanation makes sense, but if not, I totally understand if you just skipped to the end of this paragraph while scratching your head and wondering why I ramble on so much.

My first airbrushing attempt. I made flowers and butterflies and cornelli lace on the top tier. The bottom tier is supposed to be tie-dyed, I think. ;)

Ok. So for the actual airbrushing I played around with 2 dummy cakes, and it took me a while to get the pressure right and get the right amount of color, but eventually I got into the groove and was able to make thin lines or thick lines. And I tried to do a tie-dye look on one of the tiers...it looked alright. But then I found a stencil and some pearl airbrush spray stuff and stenciled on a design. This is what it looked like:

Kind of... cool, right? I know the crappy camera phone picture doesn't look too hot, but I promise the pink/purple/orange combo looked better in person. Now all I need to do is figure out how to get the stencil to stay steady on the cake, because I only have 2 hands and can only do so much. I welcome your suggestions!!! :)

So that was my first experience with an airbrush machine. What do you think? Is it worth my $65 investment? Should I get one?