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Hey guys,
I'm planing on doing orange skinned lizardmen with blue scales, I was wondering whether I should prime them black or white. What one would be better? I've googled it and looked all over the place and couldn't find it. What do you guys think?

Additionally, how would I go about painting orange? Start with brown and work my way up to blazing orange?

Thanks in advance, Flaming Troll

I do orange over black, and what I do is throw down a basecoat of Macharius Solar Orange, wash with Ogryn Flesh, a thin coat of MSO everywhere but the shaded areas, Blazing Orange on top of that, and take some very thin Golden Yellow for the final highlight. It gives you really nice, vivid orange.

If you base white the orange will come out very very bright, but you can tone that down afterwards with a suitable wash or glaze without much trouble.

If you base black, you'd probably need more coats to get a good coverage and work up with browns and possibly reds. This way you could get a good realistic shadow progression by leaving some increasingly bigger areas the color of the shade before.

So I think both methods can yield very good results, with the black primed option being more time consuming for sure.

So for nice table top standard troops I would go for the white primer, slap a few coats of orange on there and wash it with a brown or red to tone it down a bit.

I would say grey, then again i am a grey basecoat fanboy... I have just tried out Macharius orange from GW and i must say i am impressed and reckon it would go down a treat on black.

I would go for white then start with red and blue and then paint up orange and lighter blue over top of that.

Black might be nice for the weapons bits that I dont know how much armor lizzies have these days.

I do my Orc and Goblins white then dark red, brown and green over top of it. I have to paint all the armor black and then dry brush metalics over it.
I do black prime for black orcs and night goblins, as they have a lot more black that is nessisary.

Perkustin wrote:I would say grey, then again i am a grey basecoat fanboy... I have just tried out Macharius orange from GW and i must say i am impressed and reckon it would go down a treat on black.

Grey? What brand grey primer do you use? I may try this out myself.

I'm still kind of on the fence, you guys have explained them all as viable options and so I am still not sure what to go with. Any other opinions on this matter?

Is this even a question? Prime them white

My friend paints his necromunda lizardmen in a really neat way, in which he undercoats with white and washes many different oranges and reds in layers (letting them dry of course) until they are the way he wants. After that, he highlights with yellows ...good memories of necromunda..

Does anybody have any pictures? I would love to see some pics to go with your examples.

ArmorOfContempt wrote:I do orange over black, and what I do is throw down a basecoat of Macharius Solar Orange, wash with Ogryn Flesh, a thin coat of MSO everywhere but the shaded areas, Blazing Orange on top of that, and take some very thin Golden Yellow for the final highlight. It gives you really nice, vivid orange.

Ill have to remember that...just tonight I was experimenting with some orange shading. Ive been wanting to do a handful of orange SM, but wasnt sure how to pull it off. Thanks for the insight.

I think the easiest method would be to prime white, basecoat orange, highlight to yellow, then wash/glaze with red to shade and dial back the highlights. Scales would follow suit with a medium blue basecoat, light blue highlight, and a darker blue wash.

A Black Ram wrote:My friend paints his necromunda lizardmen in a really neat way, in which he undercoats with white and washes many different oranges and reds in layers (letting them dry of course) until they are the way he wants. After that, he highlights with yellows ...good memories of necromunda..

I too would be fascinated to see this.

on my purple lizards (Cold ones) I based coat white and used purple washes and purples and pinks to highlight. have pics uploaded into my gallery. I am sure it would be fine with oranges too.

Why not just prime in orange? one of the more orangish Foundation colours would give a great prime/base coat all in one.

Clang wrote:Why not just prime in orange? one of the more orangish Foundation colours would give a great prime/base coat all in one.

I think I like this idea best so far. Give them a darker look. And it seems like it would be the fastest to get to good results for the lizardmen

Id go with White, easier to get a solid coat of the color you want over it.

Its always easier to darken a color up, then it is to make it lighter.

Mad4Minis wrote:

ArmorOfContempt wrote:I do orange over black, and what I do is throw down a basecoat of Macharius Solar Orange, wash with Ogryn Flesh, a thin coat of MSO everywhere but the shaded areas, Blazing Orange on top of that, and take some very thin Golden Yellow for the final highlight. It gives you really nice, vivid orange.

Ill have to remember that...just tonight I was experimenting with some orange shading. Ive been wanting to do a handful of orange SM, but wasnt sure how to pull it off. Thanks for the insight.

Make sure that yellow is REALLY thin, or ideally, mixed up with a fair bit of glaze medium.