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So I am painting up my BaC sets as Luna Wolves, and to that end i have been priming them a grey and dry brushing up to the off white of the Luna Wolves with Uluthun Grey and some nuln oil to bring out the details. It has been working fantastically but it takes 4-5 dry brushed layers to cover up the grey.

My question is when doing a primarily white or off white color, is it better to go with the grey and work up or would priming white work as well and save me some time?

I've always felt that it is easier to build up to a white as opposed to trying to take white down.

It really just depends if you want to work up to white or not. I tend to work up to colors, meaning I'll do a base, wash the model with a shade, and then bring back up to my final color which is a brighter color than the original. Since you're going to be doing off white, I'd probably take it up rather than down, but you may want to try a test model as well.

I've flip-flopped between white and black a lot over the years. However, I never have liked medium grey, because GW sprues are mostly all grey, and it's a pain if you can't clearly see what you've hit with primer.

In a perfect world, I will always prime in a color close to what's on most of the model; for instance, red for Blood Angels, blue for Ultramarines, etc. Ironically, when priming space hulk blood angels, which come on a red sprue, I prime the dark brown first, then red, lol. Otherwise, I have no idea if I missed a spot.

But where a close primer match is not possible, I used to like to go white for the lighter colors, and black for the darker colors, but now, I just go black for almost everything that I don't have a close primer match for.

Why?

I have gotten pretty decent and painting white, and I actually find it easier to paint a perfect coat of white on top of black, ironically, than a perfect coat of black on top of white. I find that it's easier to get white to black, but the finished product is often not to my liking (ie not perfectly smooth). For example, if I have to paint hazard stripes (yellow and black), I find it easier to prime black and paint the yellow stripes, rather than prime white, and paint the yellow stripes (easy) and black stripes (hard).

But like I said, I've flip-flopped a lot on this, so just try it and see which gives you more mileage

I prime grey, then directionally spray from above with white primer. Then paint the whole model with washes (including white wash for white models). I find it is just quick and easy to do this as it gives nice pre-shading.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Talys wrote:
I actually find it easier to paint a perfect coat of white on top of black, ironically, than a perfect coat of black on top of white. I find that it's easier to get white to black, but the finished product is often not to my liking (ie not perfectly smooth). For example, if I have to paint hazard stripes (yellow and black), I find it easier to prime black and paint the yellow stripes, rather than prime white, and paint the yellow stripes (easy) and black stripes (hard)

What black and yellow paint are you using?!?!?

Yellow and white (along with other bright colours) are notorioisly hard to get to from black, while black is the Chuck Norris of colours and covers everything.

xraytango wrote:
I've always felt that it is easier to build up to a white as opposed to trying to take white down.

I'm the opposite, I prefer to work down from white than work up from grey or black. But it depends on the techniques you're using.

If the off white you're trying to do is very "off" (as in, not that close to white) I'd consider a grey, but otherwise I prefer white.

That said, some grey primers are quite a light grey anyway.

 SilverMK2 wrote:

 Talys wrote:
I actually find it easier to paint a perfect coat of white on top of black, ironically, than a perfect coat of black on top of white. I find that it's easier to get white to black, but the finished product is often not to my liking (ie not perfectly smooth). For example, if I have to paint hazard stripes (yellow and black), I find it easier to prime black and paint the yellow stripes, rather than prime white, and paint the yellow stripes (easy) and black stripes (hard)

What black and yellow paint are you using?!?!?

Yellow and white (along with other bright colours) are notorioisly hard to get to from black, while black is the Chuck Norris of colours and covers everything.

Yes, yes, I know, it's strange, and sounds bizarre. Past me would tell present me that I'm crazy.

First of all, part of the equation is that I almost never need to paint straight white on any large area. At most, it's a dot or a highlight. I mean, even my white scars aren't painted white. Probably the whitest the basecoat gets is celestra or ulthuan grey, and if I have to shade to pure white for some reason, it will usually be with an airbrush.

But, on the occasions that I do paint straight white, for instance on a dark angels icon, I take ceramite white with a little bit of Flo-Aid, and just layer it about 2-3 coats, then do 6-7 coats of white scar with Flo-Aid until it's straight white. It looks perfect every time. For yellow, same sort of thing: averland sunset with a bit of flo-aid, about 4 coats, then probably yriel yellow, about.... 10+ coats -- whatever it takes to get to a solid block of yellow.

For black, my go to is P3 Thamar Black. In some cases, if it's the wrong shade of black (yeah, sounds funny, I know), I use Abadon, or Vallejo. It doesn't really matter; they work pretty similarly. But I find that unlike dark brown, which always goes on smoothly and levels perfectly, Black can be chalky. It also doesn't work well with flo-aid: the resulting paint might not have brushstrokes, but it also isn't perfectly black anymore. To get around that, I have to thin black paint with something like Nuhln Oil, which makes a disaster on my wet palette. To get from white primer to perfectly smooth, jet black on a large space? Yes, for sure I can get there, but it's a lot of coats.

There is also my cheat, which is just to coat it with black gesso, which covers anything in 1 coat. But it's not perfectly smooth, if I'm looking for a flawless quality finished output. Or Cheat #2 -- I say screw it, mask, and airbrush it with polyurethane black primer and then just lightly coat it with black paint.

By the way, to me, dark brown, Warplock Bronze, and Leadbelcher are the Chuck Norris of colors. Or, um, the Yoda of colors. Yoda > Chuck Norris

I haven't experimented much with different primer brands, only used the GW white / black. But I prefer starting with Black and working my up.
Any other primer brands you guys prefer over GW?

Remember this thread is talking specifically about painting white (or off white).

Sure, you can start from a black primer if you want to paint white, I certainly wouldn't be recommending someone do that. I'd leave that to the painters who know what they're doing and are happy painting 30 layers of paint to achieve their perfectly blended and smooth, non-chalky white

LunaWolvesLoyalist wrote:
So I am painting up my BaC sets as Luna Wolves, and to that end i have been priming them a grey and dry brushing up to the off white of the Luna Wolves with Uluthun Grey and some nuln oil to bring out the details. It has been working fantastically but it takes 4-5 dry brushed layers to cover up the grey.

My question is when doing a primarily white or off white color, is it better to go with the grey and work up or would priming white work as well and save me some time?

I am also painting mine as Luna Wolves, I'm not going all the way to white, but rather to a very light grey (final colour) with a few sections of white edge highlighting type thing. I have done most of mine with a white primer, but a medium grey undercoat layer. I have a few I had to brush paint grey primer on, which is one reason I did the med. grey base. The grey primer I have is the vallejo one though and it's a quite light grey really, itself.

I really like the white primer/light grey for this. It has been a lot easier to get the colours I wanted - usually I prime black, which I really didn't want to do here. I'm not drybrushing mine, but I'm sure you'd be better off priming white as well, imo. There's a nice Krylon primer that comes in super flat, which is what I'm using.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Remember this thread is talking specifically about painting white (or off white).

Sure, you can start from a black primer if you want to paint white, I certainly wouldn't be recommending someone do that. I'd leave that to the painters who know what they're doing and are happy painting 30 layers of paint to achieve their perfectly blended and smooth, non-chalky white

Yes, that's a good point. Frankly, if I were painting Luna Wolves I would do all the white with an airbrush -- blue-grey off-white basecoat, brighter off-white zenithal, highlight with actual white and carefully ink in the recesses, and call it a day for all the white stuff. It would just be so much easier than a regular paintbrush.

A nice color to prime with using an airbrush, IMO, is desert tan (Vallejo primer), which is a bone-colored off-white. I like the coverage of it a lot better than white, and it's really easy to layer over with any of the off-white paints.

But barring that, the new GW Corax White primer is really, really nice for those "mostly white" models. I've only used it once (borrowed a friend's can to try it out), and was immediately in love with it. It's so much nicer than the regular Citadel or P3 white primer, but it's also quite expensive.

A lot of what I was talking about was models that have a lot of white, but still have lots of other dark colors, like white scars on bikes. In those cases, sure, the white is not easy to paint, but neither is the black (if you prime white).