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Hey Dakka, I've been using the Citadel Spray Primer for...ever haha but the price is a little bit much, so I went and picked a can of this Formula P3, and I just wanted to know what you guys think of P3. Is it better that Citadel? Have you ever had any problems with it??

It's better than Citadel and has a unique nozzle that sprays a "sheet" of paint that fans out from the opening, sort of like a projector or laser.

It goes on quite smooth and thin and is a good primer, though you'll likely need more than a single coat.

Army Painter and P3 both do good primers. Frankly I don't really view the Citadel stuff as primer. It's really just a thin spray paint. You also waste a very large amount rather too easily with Citadel's aerosols, which my cynical mind thinks is intentional.

If you have any likelihood to do a lot of minis in the future, consider saving up for a modest spraygun/airbrush setup, because then you can use a spray primer like Vallejo's polyurethane primers. Honestly those things are fantastic - really great coat, you save on wastage and the price is good. The setup will help your basecoating too =)

I'll have to check out this Vallejo primer then, I already got myself set up with the Iwata Eclipse, and a Iwata Smart Jet compressor, I'm just tired of paying 20 bucks for Citadel stuff.

Oh you're good to go then. I was in the same position for a time, buying a few cans of spray primer and probably half of it being wasted on the spray trap.

Basically the vallejo primers give a very durable coat, and the stuff is ready out of the bottle - and rather like model air, goes through an airbrush very very easily without clogging much. The best part of using an airbrush to do the priming however, is the accuracy with which you can do the work, resulting in a LOT less paint wastage. You can literally pour the extra left at the end back into the bottle from the airbrush's cup. It also brushes on very nicely too.

Can you mix colours into it?

Not sure about adding colors, honestly. Even if the formulations did play nicely together, I would worry that adding too much regular paint would dilute the properties specific to the primer (the superior resilience, adhesion, and tooth). Since many of the people who use Vallejo PU primers spray it through an airbrush, simply spraying the next coat in color isn't much extra work, so I haven't even heard of anyone bothering to experiment.

That said, mixing the various PU primers together is neither terribly uncommon nor problematic. The grey is quite light, so I know a number of people who mix it with a bit of the black to get a medium grey to work from.

If you have an airbrush you should be priming with that.