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Title says it all.

There's several ways of painting white. You can lay down a coat of blue-grey, or more of a pure grey, you can also use something like a cream colour or a greyish brown which I think looks more natural.

You can also just lay down a coat of white and then shade it and highlight it again to bring back the whiteness.

Regardless of which method you pick, you are going to be doing lots and lots of thin coats in order to get a nice solid cover over a black primer.

If any of my models has any significant amount of white I will consider priming white (or light grey) instead of black, even if the model is mostly dark colours, it's far easier to make a white undercoated model dark than it is to make a black undercoated model have a vibrant white.

I actually very rarely prime black any more. The only models I've primed black in the past few years have been my 40k Aeronautica Ork vehicles because they are 90% black and my Night Goblins because, of course, they are mostly black

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
There's several ways of painting white. You can lay down a coat of blue-grey, or more of a pure grey, you can also use something like a cream colour or a greyish brown which I think looks more natural.

You can also just lay down a coat of white and then shade it and highlight it again to bring back the whiteness.

Regardless of which method you pick, you are going to be doing lots and lots of thin coats in order to get a nice solid cover over a black primer.

If any of my models has any significant amount of white I will consider priming white (or light grey) instead of black, even if the model is mostly dark colours, it's far easier to make a white undercoated model dark than it is to make a black undercoated model have a vibrant white.

I actually very rarely prime black any more. The only models I've primed black in the past few years have been my 40k Aeronautica Ork vehicles because they are 90% black and my Night Goblins because, of course, they are mostly black

Thanks for the advice friend!

I'm doing work on my custom chapter, which is dark purple with white pauldrons. I would usually just prime the pauldrons white separately, but Devastator marine's arms a bit tricky. :(

I'm sure you're aware of this but the citadel 'base' paints (or similar ones from other companies) are helpful here - you'll still want to do a couple of thinner coats rather than one thick one, to keep it looking smooth, but you'll get there much quicker!

As to colour it depends on whether you want a cool white or a warm one. If you want a white with cold, blueish shadows then you'll want your base-coat to be a blue/grey colour but if you want a white with warm shades then start from a pale brown or cream.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
There's several ways of painting white. You can lay down a coat of blue-grey, or more of a pure grey, you can also use something like a cream colour or a greyish brown which I think looks more natural.

Skink's got it. Cool whites tend to use gray or blue whereas warm whites tend to start with brown or yellow as a base. If your marines are purple, the cool white might work better. But experiment on a couple spare shoulder pads and see which you prefer.

Lately, I've taken to painting white using the old GW color Space Wolf Grey then highlighting with pure white. It gives the white a slightly blue tint, but still alows me to add a highlight.

Over the years I've gotten fussier about having smooth coats of paint and since it's much easier to spray or airbrush a smooth coat, I'd actually be tempted to spray the model white or grey or cream coloured first, focusing on the shoulder pads, then mask off the shoulder pads and spray the model black. You can mask them with a masking fluid (have a google, there's a few options, I'm using Mr Hobby's Mr Masking Sol Neo) or just blutack.

But it depends on your painting technique, I'd mask them simply because it's both time consuming and difficult to get a really nice smooth coat of a light colour over black. GW's base paint range helps, but you're still looking at several thin coats to get good smooth coverage (I'd be expecting 3 or 4 thin coats).

+1 to masking, cruise control for success