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I have painted Orks but they are much more forgiving as they just get more Orky! So I am pretty terrible at painting (and grammar) but want to make a Brotherhood of NOD army in the game Infinity. I was wondering if I prime the models either grey or chaos red (from Army Painter). And then black wash many layers would be possible to get the look. While google has been helpful to see that painting with washes is possible. My Google-fu hasn't been very helpful for finding out if black can be pulled off.

The thing with black (or white) is that you don't actually want that colour - if you look at your picture, there is a very limited amount of black - look at anything black, like your keyboard or whatever, and if you wanted to paint a picture of it, it would be mostly grey.

I'd prime medium grey (the uniform grey from AP will be fine, it doesn't look like your picture above), black wash the hell out of it, then do your reds. Red over black is not fun, so get a good red to do that work for you (the GW Mephiston red does good work), then go over the visor with blood for the blood god.

Thanks! Is there any other grey primer you would recommend over it? I have only have experience with army painter since it suggested by my LGS. I liked it a lot the first time around.

I reckon the AP one will be fine, it will look more like this;

http://admin.thearmypainter.com/files/products/ProductImages_2015/Sprays/CP3010_UniformGrey_1280x128027.png

I use Krylon Color Master primer myself. Its only $5.00 a spray can and its very good

I'm not an overly skilled painter myself, but in my experience when painting very dark colours that are close to black the highlights are more important than the shades. Colours close to white are the opposite, you tend to focus on the shading more than the highlights to give the model depth.

It makes sense, if you look at a black object, it's where the light is reflecting off it that stands out and is why black things don't simply look like a void of nothingness.

So you have to start with a very dark grey, almost black basecoat and then follow it up with a couple of medium grey edge highlights then if you want at the end hit it with a black wash to tie them all together.

If you want red, my suggestion would be to basecoat with that chaotic red, then do a couple of edge highlights (maybe something like khorne red followed by blood red) and then hit it with a black wash.

I'm intentionally saying do the black wash last as it will dull down the highlights a little bit and tie the model together more.

If you don't do the highlights and plan to just do it with washes, you'll have the problem where if you start with a light grey then wash, most of the model will still look too light so the model will look grey rather than black. If you start with a dark grey and then wash, the model won't have enough contrast, it'll just look very flat.

So I suggest learning how to do some decent edge highlighting, but it does mean the models are going to take longer to paint unfortunately! Both black and white tend to be colours that aren't conducive to painting quickly.