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Hi! I’m building a tau army and painting it in a black stealth paint scheme. I plan on painting it with an airbrush and the Matt scale 75 paints. Is the any point under painting it if I’m gonna paint it black? I will glaze it with black though.

I would always suggest priming the model. In your case, priming black could also be your base coat, before moving on to highlights with the airbrush.

I might suggest priming with a dark, charcoal grey, followed by a black wash before going to the air brush for highlights. I think that would help to add depth of colour / shade to your minis.

 greatbigtree wrote:
I would always suggest priming the model. In your case, priming black could also be your base coat, before moving on to highlights with the airbrush.

I might suggest priming with a dark, charcoal grey, followed by a black wash before going to the air brush for highlights. I think that would help to add depth of colour / shade to your minis.

I agree with all of this.

First primer does an important job. A black primer saves you time and effort.

But also, the trick to painting black is to not actually use black. If you picture a scale from 1 white to 10 black having a 8 or 9 grey as your base allows you to use washes/inks and then a 7 or 8 to layer on some depth and maybe a 6-7 for highlights. It will look like black, but it wont be flat and you wont have to work as hard to give it depth.

I agree with what Lance says.

I find a mini needs at least 3 shades to fully develop the details. In this case, Dark shadow (#10 black), mid-black (#8) followed by highlights / edges (#6, Dark to mid grey).

There are “cheats” to achieve that in other ways, but I would suggest that fewer steps will result in a flat black, and that serves to obscure details rather then enhance them as painting generally does.

Yup. Even if you don't bother with any edge high lighting having an 8 base with a 10 wash and a 6-7 dry brush will look pretty great. If you really want to muddy it up and keep it dark do the wash last so the dry brush gets darkened a little by the wash.

It’s solid info everywhere so far.
Ironically, painting it black to begin with actually makes the black look worse than a deep grey.

As for undercoating, I always do it.
While it’s mainly habit, it makes the painting a lot smoother.
If you have any resin or metal models then for the love of god, undercoat them first.

In terms of highlighting the dark grey, you can also bring in stronger tones depending on the colours you choose.
I love highlighting it with a navy blue down to royal blue then a mid tone grey.
This makes it stand out nicely.
I prefer this to just using greys as a highlight.

P3 Charcoal Black is a great undercoat, especially for armor as it has a not-quite-visible-but-sort-of-visible blue tint to it (like charcoal ironically enough) makes it more of a 9 black and not a 10 black. Citadel Dark Reaper is a good highlight if applied lightly so as not to get a "Tron" vibe.

For sure, going to “coloured” highlights rather than grey is doable. Really, you could come up to any colour, grey just being a neutral option, but you could come up to any colour instead, if you want to.

Black being a shade, rather than a “chroma” means that any colour, darkened enough, becomes black same as any colour lightened enough becomes white. It’s a bit trickier to get the shade balance right with a colour “highlight” but completely doable.