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I understand that many people find it difficult to paint white. I'm currently painting an Eldar Wraithlord and I have it primed white at the moment.

I have a couple questions, so bear with me haha:
Do you need to paint over the primer? Can I just leave the parts I want to remain white as they are?
Also, will touching up the white primer on parts leave brush strokes, or will that issue be solved by keeping my white paint watered down?

Thanks you in advance,
Dinkins

Sometimes after doing my usual black/grey/white priming, I've been so impressed with the effect that I've not wanted to mess with it much.

Okay, so I probably want to do some other painting, washes, blacklining etc. after that, but I've learned to hit the primer with a varnish layer to seal it because it seems to be quite porous and anything really thin going over it does undesirable stuff.

I prime white.

Even if I want something to end up white, I paint over it with white paint. The shade of primer and my paint is not quite a match, and I’m a sloppy guy, so I’m going to need to do a clean up pass on the white anyway. So I just do it all anyway for consistency.

White, more so then most other colors, needs a lot of thin coats. If not you get an ugly, chalky texture a/o brush strokes.

I hate white. My hat’s off to those who use it as a dominant color. Just the accents I do are enough to drive me mad.

You're best off priming white, coating with something off-white, and then darkening recesses and highlighting certain areas to actual white.

If you use a very white color as your main model color, you run into the problem that there's nothing you can highlight with, and the model looks too flat. Keep in mind that most things in real life which are white (like a Persian cat or a teacup), if photographed, are not 100% white in very many places.

I googled'how to paint red scorpions' and the entire first page was tutorials on how to paint them, lol. The knowledge is out there and very very easy to find man.

If you painted the rest of the model with no highlights and shades, then it'd probably look fine.

But since we typically highlight and shade all the other stuff on the model, if you just leave the white as pure white it'll contrast too much and look too flat.

As people have mentioned already you also typically want to paint white as an off-white anyway. Either slightly grey, slightly beige or slightly blue-grey.

The fastest way I've come up with for painting a white that I think looks decent is to prime white and then straight over the primer apply an oil paint directly to the crevices and blend it in to the rest of the surface. The oil paint will stain the surface, giving you the off-white, and the blending can be made quite smooth. But I'm sure the effect isn't to everyone's tastes.

In general I prefer to put a heavily thinned coat of regular white paint over the primer just to reduce the porosity (sometimes a primed surface is too porous if the day was too warm and/or you sprayed from too far away).

 Joyous_Oblivion wrote:
I googled'how to paint red scorpions' and the entire first page was tutorials on how to paint them, lol. The knowledge is out there and very very easy to find man.

I think you might be in the wrong thread mate.

I second the fact that white is not white, when painting my sons of malice, wich us just black and white i prime in white. But you need to paint it with something like ulthuan grey inorder to have the white "dulled down" a bit so you can use white to highlight- otherwise it will end ip looking flat.