airbrush
/ˈɛːbrʌʃ
/noun
An artist’s device for spraying paint by means of compressed air.Using airbrush, spray paint, glitter and acrylic, she depicts subjects ranging from a military operation in Iraq to a piece of Chinese porcelain, in a kind of fuzzy, watercolorish manner....
- All paints sprayed through an airbrush must have the consistency of milk.
- A ten to 15-minute session, using an airbrush to spray the substance on the skin, causes the tan to develop over the next 24 hours and it lasts between five and ten days.
verb [with object]
1Paint with an airbrush: the cab was airbrushed with a mural of a sunset...
- After he was airbrushed with silver paint, he lay down in the pool for the overhead photo and hooked his legs around an aluminum pool rail.
- Yokosuka's Morale, Welfare and Recreation department is responsible for providing Tanner with the opportunity to paint and airbrush different buildings around the base.
- The work's neon-bright surfaces range from the impeccably airbrushed to lumpy aquarium rocks drenched in paint and glued on.
1.1Alter or conceal (a photograph or a detail in one) using an airbrush: a picture of a man with wings airbrushed on to his shoulders...
- The photo shows me aloft (they airbrushed the photograph to camouflage the torn clothing).
- I've had hours of makeup and hair and good lighting and then the photos are airbrushed.
- Being photographed for magazines myself, I know that they airbrush you and they make you look much better than you do in real life.
1.2Represent or describe as better or more beautiful than in reality: many lived through the disasters and know that the past has been airbrushed...
- Reality is airbrushed and we're given promises of fabulous, mythical oases of futurity.
- But since governments also occasionally do the same, likewise claiming to act with the sanction of the people, both parties are united sooner or later in the resolve to airbrush such realities out of the record.
- It is here that Kundera points to the tyranny of totalitarian power which airbrushes the past to control the future, so that questions and issues that might be raised are mocked out of existence.
