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Hey dudes and dudettes!
I was wondering which is the best colour to prime mini's?
I use a black primer and i have always been curious to what the pros and cons are of grey, white etc etc
Thanks for any help!

Pros:
- Colours will be more vibrant
- Many colours will get good coverage with less coats (yellows, reds, light browns, light greens)
- If you want a mixture of bright and dark colours on a model, it's often easier to start with white to make the bright colours bright and then darken the dark colours.
- If you want mostly darker colours, depending on the technique it can be easier to work from a bright colour down to a dark shade.
- You can use thinned down paints to create some shading where the white shines through, but only on the raised details.


Cons
- Some people find it more natural to work from dark shades up to lighter shades.
- With a black undercoat if you miss a spot (particularly at the line between colours) it probably won't stand out as much.
- If you get poor coverage, white will often look messier (unless you were specifically going for the shaded look, but even then if you screw it up it's easy to make a model look messy).


I almost always undercoat white or light grey. The only exception is models that are actually predominantly black, like my Night Goblins. Even then I actually ran out of black primer so for my last 40 or so Night Goblins I just undercoated them with light grey primer then sprayed them black with Tamiya's Flat Black spray.

Thanks!
Been out the hobby for nearly 10 years now and its time to get some info restored, I have been using imperial primer as i have recently moved house and i dont have the best place to use spray. Going to buy a grey primer spray. Would you recommend any mate?
I live in scotland and i can see you from OZ, so please dont refer me to a site from down under boss!
Cheers Mate

Halfords grey primer gets a lot of praise, which I can add too. Any auto primers seem to get good press.

I use Halford's because I can always trust the results. I use 3 colours they do (grey, red oxide & yellow ochre). Haven't used white in a long time. For some reason they don't do a black primer so I just use GW.

Using a color primer (Vajello makes a lot of them, though no spray cans), you can skip doing several coats of a transparent color like red or yellow, which can be a huge labor saver.

If you're doing a white paint-job, white primer is very, very useful. It's also good if you're doing any bright color and you don't have a color primer that matches.

Grey primer is good for cutting down on the number of coats required from a dark but transparent color (many blue and greens, for example). The downside to grey is that it's often hard to tell where you missed spots while priming, unless you're using a non-grey plastic.

Black is good because it's very easy to see if you missed a spot, and it's a natural shading if you happen to miss a crevice or three in the course of painting. It's fault tolerant.

Yup +1 for Halfords primers, Black Grey or white are all good.
Also Poundland have a super cheap primer that is perfectly acceptable for some terrain and less detailed projects.

Waiting on Grey plastic primer from halfords to come via mail, Will update once i have tried it out and see if i run into some problems.
Thanks again dudes!