Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hey Dakka Dakka,

So I am getting ready to start painting up my new Ork army. I have been with Tyranids thus far so I am happy to have a bit of a change.

I have decided to prime the Orks black. I primed all of my Tyranids White.

My question is this:

What is the basis of the decision to prime either white or black?

I understand that if you are planning on painting up a "darker" toned miniature that you want to go with a black prime. And on the other end if you are planning on your model being brighter then it would be wise to use a white primer.

This doesn't tell me why though. Is this simply to prevent one from having to use multiple layers while painting? I find that I tend to do multiple layers regardless because I like to use very thin paint. Just looking for the thoughts of those more experienced than I.

Thank you!

White will give a brighter end result, even if you're using predominantly darker colours.

I almost always prime black, just because it suits my painting style. Although I have on occasion gone white or grey where I was painting a specific effect that wanted the lighter base.

If you want to paint brighter, more true colors, go white. It winds up being a lot more work because you'll have to paint the recesses in darker, but it's the only way to make a bright color such as yellow or red really stand out. Keep in mind that even painting over white, you're going to need a LOT of thin layers to make things like yellow really stand out. Black does a lot of the work for you beforehand. You won't have to pay much attention to the details, as a quick overbrush leaves the recesses black, and you can use washes to blend to the black in a more natural way, allowing you to focus on the details you want to embellish upon more than doing a lot of elbow grease. White ultimately leads to superior models, in my opinion. But... try a grey.... It works really well on 40k models that have a lot of colors going on at once.

IMO, simply: Black is much more forgiving when mistakes are made.

When you prime white, and miss something (a crack here, a tiny piece there) it stands out a LOT more than black.

**So many edits, dangit!

I always base black then drybrush in white as a pre highlighting process keeps my brights bright and my recesses dark

Depends on your color scheme IMO. I prime white when I want the colors to be bright, i.e. red, oranges, yellows, bright blues and greens. Everything else gets a black prime, as it is usually easier to paint over and doesn't show imperfections much. White can be unforgiving if you're trying to get a dark scheme, but is much better for the brighter colors. Try painting yellow and red on a black primed mini. You usually have to do a lot of layers to get the solid colors, where as white will go on much more clearly

When I paint, i use both. I spray black first and the white from one angle, and one angle only. Depending on the direction I want my color blending to go. This way you get a simple transition from black to white that easily blends colors simply because it does it on its own.

I use to just do black, but I realised it wasn't for me and took longer to paint. I switched to white because the colors look better and go on much easier. Now I do the method I mentioned previously.

Black is easier to cover - a couple of light coats, and presto. My favorite spray primer is P3 black. It's very resilient and scratch-resistant after the first week or so (to cure). Black is very nice if you're painting blues, greys, dark greens, dark purples, especially if you paint from dark base coat to lightest layers/highlights, because the basecoat and wash are done with very few coats. Also, black is a natural color to put under silver and dark bronze (like Citadel's Warplock Bronze).

However, black is impractical if a large part of your model is going to be a bright warm color such as red, yellow, or orange, and it's terrible for very light colors like white, bone, light green, light grey, pink, or any pastel. This is because thinned acrylic paints take many layers before they provide opacity, and with fantasy/scifi miniatures, you want colors to pop. To get a really bright pink or yellow on top of black therefore takes many more layers than over white.

Another thing to remember is that it takes only a few coats of a dark acrylic to cover a light acrylic, but many coats of a light acrylic to cover a dark acrylic. So, if you have a split model where half is white and half is black, you'll need less total paint if you prime it white.

A couple of other things to consider are grey primers, and colored primers. A lot of people like grey because they make painting both the dark and light colors reasonable, but I am not a fan, because many GW sprues are grey, and it's difficult to see what is sprayed or how saturated an area is. Army painter has many colored primers that will make your life a little easier, too

Hope that helps

 KingCracker wrote:
When I paint, i use both. I spray black first and the white from one angle, and one angle only. Depending on the direction I want my color blending to go. This way you get a simple transition from black to white that easily blends colors simply because it does it on its own.

I use to just do black, but I realised it wasn't for me and took longer to paint. I switched to white because the colors look better and go on much easier. Now I do the method I mentioned previously.

Interesting. Does this leave any grey parts? I'd like to see pictures/a video of your priming style. May have to steal it myself

White all the way. I go for brightness and pop even in my darker toned stuff.

I prime almost everything white or grey if I'm going to be hairy brush painting it. The only things I prime black are things that are primarily black like my night goblins. Everything else, white is easier.

It's easier to prime white, which gives nice bright colours, then dull it down if you want it darker vs priming black and having to do layer after layer to try and get decent coverage.

If I'm going to be airbrushing most of the model rather than hairy brush painting, I will prime black more often as it's easier to build a nice colour up with an airbrush and priming black means that if you miss a spot, it will just look like a shadow. Actually I don't own a black airbrush primer, so I still just prime grey and then go over it with black.

Sometimes when I'm airbrushing a model I'll spray black in the crevices and then spray white on the raised areas to preshade... but I don't do that often as I prefer to shade with shades of the actual colour I'm using OR preshade in burnt umber... preshading black looks weird to me. I've never understood why it's so popular to preshade with black, most colours we DON'T mix black in to darken it so why would we preshade with black? Anyway, that's a rant for a different thread

I prefer white.

Now there are issues regarding missing cracks etc and having the white stick out but a little trick I do with my skaven is prime white and then slap on a nice bit of a homemade brown wash. This gets in the cracks especially when speed painting this helps tremendously.

I also find that priming black takes a lot more work for me to get the brighter colours I want. I still prime my Tau in black though (suits the scheme)

White Primer allows greater detail and finer control over your colors. It's trivial to make a lighter color dark, but very hard to get a darker color light, especially without overdoing the layers and having issues.

IMO White 100% of the time, except when you're just starting out and need to cover mistakes... which honestly these days, washes can cover mistakes just fine.

Am I the only one that uses gray primer? Seems to me it is the best of both worlds when priming.

So what I'm getting is that white is superior, mostly for bright/light colors, but leaves your recesses bright/white and make it hard to show lowlights and cover mistakes. For this reason, would it be a good idea to use a dark wash of the same primary color you're basecoating in to blend those lowlights better and cover up the blaring white recesses/mistakes?

In a separate but similar vein, has anyone entirely primed a unit/army to decide later they want it primed in the other color? (black to white or white to black) and what difference does the repriming make?

 bocatt wrote:
So what I'm getting is that white is superior, mostly for bright/light colors, but leaves your recesses bright/white and make it hard to show lowlights and cover mistakes. For this reason, would it be a good idea to use a dark wash of the same primary color you're basecoating in to blend those lowlights better and cover up the blaring white recesses/mistakes?

In a separate but similar vein, has anyone entirely primed a unit/army to decide later they want it primed in the other color? (black to white or white to black) and what difference does the repriming make?

To answer your first question, yes. It doesn't have to be the same primary color, but for instance if you wanted to do a light tan Tau, I would prime white then wash with a dark brown/tan to give it a good undercoat.

In regards to your second question, it doesn't have much of an effect if you're careful. If you do several prime swaps (white to black to white) it will obviously mar and blur the details, but usually doing white to black or vice versa won't mar it too much. It's obviously always better to start fresh with gray and thus strip your minis before repriming, but one second coat shouldn't hurt it much.

Most of the time nowadays i use two colors: grey and reddish brown.

Grey because it's kind of like white in the sense that it makes bright colors easier to paint (but not as easy as white) but still give a bit of shadow depth that black gives (but not as much).

Reddish brown because it's already a good basecoat for skintone. Also if your colors are gonna be predominantly red, yellow, orange or gold.

In a separate but similar vein, has anyone entirely primed a unit/army to decide later they want it primed in the other color?

Happened to me when I was starting out. Made a Space Marine army with a white and red scheme. Primed them black. WHYYYYYY

 jreilly89 wrote:

 KingCracker wrote:
When I paint, i use both. I spray black first and the white from one angle, and one angle only. Depending on the direction I want my color blending to go. This way you get a simple transition from black to white that easily blends colors simply because it does it on its own.
I use to just do black, but I realised it wasn't for me and took longer to paint. I switched to white because the colors look better and go on much easier. Now I do the method I mentioned previously.

Interesting. Does this leave any grey parts? I'd like to see pictures/a video of your priming style.

Yeah, that does sound like something worth seeing.

 heartserenade wrote:
Most of the time nowadays i use two colors: grey and reddish brown.
Grey because it's kind of like white in the sense that it makes bright colors easier to paint (but not as easy as white) but still give a bit of shadow depth that black gives (but not as much).
Reddish brown because it's already a good basecoat for skintone. Also if your colors are gonna be predominantly red, yellow, orange or gold.

Back when I did BT and Centurion minis I started with the grey, but then switched to a slightly darker than medium brown auto primer since most everything was ending up painted green, grey, or some type of brown anyways if not a mix using of all of them.

Using black just seemed to make some parts too dark with those colors over it (or to see for painting details), and white too bright for those same choices.
The biggest problem was all that too often the primer coat would be grainy and need micro-sanding, which is a suck chore - more than a few models ended up in the Simple Green.

_
_

 Killionaire wrote:
White Primer allows greater detail and finer control over your colors. It's trivial to make a lighter color dark, but very hard to get a darker color light, especially without overdoing the layers and having issues.

IMO White 100% of the time, except when you're just starting out and need to cover mistakes... which honestly these days, washes can cover mistakes just fine.

i'm the exact opposite...
i hate white primer...
the only time i would ever use it is if i am going to be using glazes instead of opaque paint...

i like black, and don't find that i have any problem with my colors or detail...
i paint from darkest to lightest, so by the time i am highlighting, there are so many opaque layers of paint on there that my colors are always super-bright...

grey primer is alright, but i go so dark in my shadows anyway, that it doesn't have any benefit, aside from the fact that it is the color that i have on hand at the moment...
i may lay down my basecoat over it, but the next layer is so dark, that i might as well just be painting over black...
the same goes if i only have white available...
i still paint it black first...

white primer just doesn't fit my painting style, at all...
though it is fun when i am playing around with the glazing, or juicing, paint technique...
it's not a style of choice for me, but i have been asked to use it a few times...

i like everything black, though...
black shoes, black clothes, black wetsuit, black girls, and black primer...

for learning how to paint, though, i guess white could be easier...
it really depends on how you want to approach painting, which is something that people don't mention often enough...
what kind of painting style someone wants to achieve is an important part of what advice to take...
if you want to paint with a more naturalistic look, white is good...
if, like me, you want to paint with a comic book style, i say black, every time...

cheers
jah

I will say that if you're painting 1 offs or high level stuff, it really just depends on what technique you are using and frequently it doesn't matter at all.

The last thing I was painting was a 1 off Space Marine for a new colour scheme I'm testing. It really made no difference what I used as the primer as I just painted it dark blue and layered and glazed my way up to the highlights. I started with a grey primer but it would have made almost no difference if I'd started with black or white.

Contrast that with my Orcs, they take massively longer if I start with a black base because using a white base I just go white -> watered down green paint -> green wash -> brown wash -> done. Same with my Tyranids, because they are mostly bone coloured I can do them white prime -> bone colour -> wash -> done, if I started with a black undercoat it'd take much longer.

So I tend to think white is better in the context of painting an army, where you want to take shortcuts to get things painted quickly but still have them looking neat, my reasoning for this is if you thin your paints the white is going to give you a nice vibrant colour in less coats of paint and if you want to dull it down, a filter or a wash is very quick to apply, even to a whole army.

If you're painting only show pieces instead of armies, starting from black is fine because you're probably going to be spending a lot of time layering and blending, layering and blending, layering and blending regardless of what colour you primed.

Boss GreenNutz wrote:
Am I the only one that uses gray primer? Seems to me it is the best of both worlds when priming.

Nope. I've gone entirely to Grey primer as well. It's a wonderful combination - less likely to dampen colors than black, but more forgiving of missed little bits than white. It can be a little frustrating, admittedly, to prime something to "Plastic Sprue Grey", but I'd never go back to black or white.

I have learned my lesson about cheap white primers...

Anecdote time
So I originally bought Army Painter matte black spray primer to paint my behemoth (dark red, black) tyranids in a very dark, evil alien looking scheme. The primer went on amazing. Smooth, good seal and tooth. Very pleased with this primer. Still use it for anything I want to prime black.

Sadly I realized that I could not make those colors look they way I wanted to and instead experimented with bone and red and loved it. Unfortunately painting bone and red, layer after painstaking layer over black primer is a nightmare. It takes me two hours just to get a decent looking gaunt (blended well enough to not stick out like a sore thumb on the tabletop) so I decided to go white.

I didn't want to buy another $12 can of primer though so I bought some brush on white primer. Thinned it, brushed it on and it would not cover the model! 6,7 even 8 layers later and there was still black or grey showing through. I painted over it and it turned out fine (no worse than the ones primed black) but my gosh, what a waste of time! It had taken me just as long if not longer than to just paint over black. So that was out.

Well then I tried Armory primer, which is about half the cost of the good stuff. Took it outside (70s, 20-40% humidity, no wind) shook the can for a two or three minutes, sprayed on a sheet then got to work priming my models. What a disaster! The first few were operator error, it went on thick because I had no judge of exactly how far away to hold the can. But once I got the hang of it, I was left with thin, weak grip and it was fuzzy... I went back with a toothbrush after it had dried to remove the fuzz and it came off alright but in patches. Leaving me with a roughly half primed/half unprimed model.

I tossed all the models in cleaner so I can scrub that gak off later.

Needless to say I'll be shelling out the $12 for army painter matte white the next time i visit the FLGS.

I might try priming with gesso if anyone can convince me it really is the bomb.com

TL;DR army painter is the best and cheap white primers suck

 bocatt wrote:
I have learned my lesson about cheap white primers...

Anecdote time
So I originally bought Army Painter matte black spray primer to paint my behemoth (dark red, black) tyranids in a very dark, evil alien looking scheme. The primer went on amazing. Smooth, good seal and tooth. Very pleased with this primer. Still use it for anything I want to prime black.

Sadly I realized that I could not make those colors look they way I wanted to and instead experimented with bone and red and loved it. Unfortunately painting bone and red, layer after painstaking layer over black primer is a nightmare. It takes me two hours just to get a decent looking gaunt (blended well enough to not stick out like a sore thumb on the tabletop) so I decided to go white.

I didn't want to buy another $12 can of primer though so I bought some brush on white primer. Thinned it, brushed it on and it would not cover the model! 6,7 even 8 layers later and there was still black or grey showing through. I painted over it and it turned out fine (no worse than the ones primed black) but my gosh, what a waste of time! It had taken me just as long if not longer than to just paint over black. So that was out.

Well then I tried Armory primer, which is about half the cost of the good stuff. Took it outside (70s, 20-40% humidity, no wind) shook the can for a two or three minutes, sprayed on a sheet then got to work priming my models. What a disaster! The first few were operator error, it went on thick because I had no judge of exactly how far away to hold the can. But once I got the hang of it, I was left with thin, weak grip and it was fuzzy... I went back with a toothbrush after it had dried to remove the fuzz and it came off alright but in patches. Leaving me with a roughly half primed/half unprimed model.

I tossed all the models in cleaner so I can scrub that gak off later.

Needless to say I'll be shelling out the $12 for army painter matte white the next time i visit the FLGS.

I might try priming with gesso if anyone can convince me it really is the bomb.com

TL;DR army painter is the best and cheap white primers suck

Never use Armory!! That gak is such utter....well, gak! Seriously. I bought a can, used it once, and tossed it. Army Painter is great, but kind of pricey. Have you tried Krylon? I haven't used their matte white, but their matte black and assorted colors are great. Base coated everything I own using Krylon and never had any problems. It goes on thicker than Army Painter, so one pass about 8-12" away is usually perfect.

 Smilodon_UP wrote:

 jreilly89 wrote:

 KingCracker wrote:
When I paint, i use both. I spray black first and the white from one angle, and one angle only. Depending on the direction I want my color blending to go. This way you get a simple transition from black to white that easily blends colors simply because it does it on its own.
I use to just do black, but I realised it wasn't for me and took longer to paint. I switched to white because the colors look better and go on much easier. Now I do the method I mentioned previously.

Interesting. Does this leave any grey parts? I'd like to see pictures/a video of your priming style.

Yeah, that does sound like something worth seeing.

 heartserenade wrote:
Most of the time nowadays i use two colors: grey and reddish brown.
Grey because it's kind of like white in the sense that it makes bright colors easier to paint (but not as easy as white) but still give a bit of shadow depth that black gives (but not as much).
Reddish brown because it's already a good basecoat for skintone. Also if your colors are gonna be predominantly red, yellow, orange or gold.

Back when I did BT and Centurion minis I started with the grey, but then switched to a slightly darker than medium brown auto primer since most everything was ending up painted green, grey, or some type of brown anyways if not a mix using of all of them.

Using black just seemed to make some parts too dark with those colors over it (or to see for painting details), and white too bright for those same choices.
The biggest problem was all that too often the primer coat would be grainy and need micro-sanding, which is a suck chore - more than a few models ended up in the Simple Green.

_
_

I learned that trick from L Bersley from awesome paint jobs. He did a video on it on YouTube and ever since I saw it, i primed that way. It works wonders. Also, i don't see how people using white primer are saying the deep parts on the model make paint brighter, that just confuses me. White shows the color easier than black, so if a recess had a dark color for shading how would it be brighter? It doesn't work that way in my experience at all.

I tend to use grey then give it a black wash to show the recesses (I'm getting old).
Here's an example:

 KingCracker wrote:

 Smilodon_UP wrote:

 jreilly89 wrote:

 KingCracker wrote:
When I paint, i use both. I spray black first and the white from one angle, and one angle only. Depending on the direction I want my color blending to go. This way you get a simple transition from black to white that easily blends colors simply because it does it on its own.
I use to just do black, but I realised it wasn't for me and took longer to paint. I switched to white because the colors look better and go on much easier. Now I do the method I mentioned previously.

Interesting. Does this leave any grey parts? I'd like to see pictures/a video of your priming style.

Yeah, that does sound like something worth seeing.

 heartserenade wrote:
Most of the time nowadays i use two colors: grey and reddish brown.
Grey because it's kind of like white in the sense that it makes bright colors easier to paint (but not as easy as white) but still give a bit of shadow depth that black gives (but not as much).
Reddish brown because it's already a good basecoat for skintone. Also if your colors are gonna be predominantly red, yellow, orange or gold.

Back when I did BT and Centurion minis I started with the grey, but then switched to a slightly darker than medium brown auto primer since most everything was ending up painted green, grey, or some type of brown anyways if not a mix using of all of them.

Using black just seemed to make some parts too dark with those colors over it (or to see for painting details), and white too bright for those same choices.
The biggest problem was all that too often the primer coat would be grainy and need micro-sanding, which is a suck chore - more than a few models ended up in the Simple Green.

_
_

I learned that trick from L Bersley from awesome paint jobs. He did a video on it on YouTube and ever since I saw it, i primed that way. It works wonders. Also, i don't see how people using white primer are saying the deep parts on the model make paint brighter, that just confuses me. White shows the color easier than black, so if a recess had a dark color for shading how would it be brighter? It doesn't work that way in my experience at all.

The were both primed in this fashion. Granted I did the majority of the blending by brush, but it still made it much easier.

I tend to use white or light grey. Mainly because I find it easier to cover a lighter colour with less layers and I can see the models details with a ligher primer colour than I can with a black primer.

Depends entirely on your painting method. Black primer is the way to go for me, as I start with the darkest tone and then layer up to the brightest, which makes white primer... well, useless.

Doing bright colours is no problem what so ever, because I layer up gradually so by the time I get to bonewhite (for example) I've already done a few layers of brown of different shades.

Once you black you dont go back



I too would like to see a video of priming white on an angle over black primer

Does anyone know how to get damn citadel spray Primer off?
Im using nailpolisher that has acetol but no effect