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I tried posting this on /r/minipainting with no luck so far, so I figured I should try here as well!

I've been watching the Vince Venturella Hobby Cheating videos on Youtube and am pretty excited to start using the underhighlighting and glazing techniques that he describes. For what it's worth, he typically talks about a three step priming process with a "basecoat" of vallejo air german grey primer followed by vallejo air cold grey at a 45 degree angle and then a pure white from 90 degrees straight down.

In watching his videos, I think he gets great results with this on a lot of colors, including blues, greens, purples and fiery red/oranges. The one thing that I'm not entirely convinced on are earthtones which look a little washed out particularly on the brighter areas.

I can't help but wondering if the results would look nicer with a dark brown base prime followed by a medium brown at 45 degrees and an almost-white tan from 90 degrees. Do any of you have experience with this?

Basically, I'm wondering if:

1. I am correct that underhighlighting in greyscale and then painting on browns does indeed look less richly brown in the hand like it does on camera?

2. If so, can this be counteracted by priming in earthtones?

3. If so, can anyone recommend a set of three colors that work well for airbrush priming for zenithal underhighlights in earthtones?
Thanks!

The technique you're talking about is more commonly referred to as zenithal preshading.

Personally, I'd generally still work over greys, but if you want richer tones, just apply thin colour filters over that before working with your earth tones.

If you desperately want to use colour primer work for the zenithal stuff (it can save a lot of time) you're going to be mixing your own colours from the Vallejo PU colour primers - these will likely be a bit more muted than you might want as they're mostly 'military' colours.

Thanks!