So I’m about to begin painting for the first time, but I’m not sure what colors to buy. I play Star Wars Legion so I’ll be painting a bunch of stormtroopers, death troopers, and other very monocolor minis. Should I use black and white primers for them? Or do neutral grey and paint the colors?
Bonus points if anyone can tell me if wildspire minis are good for a first time project.
what kind of paint do you use?
regular paints, you can really use anything
transparent paints like vallejo’s speedpaint or games workshop contrast mean you have to use white, beige, or very light grey
Planning on using Army Painter’s speedpaint 2.0.
I just read that they recommend their white or light grey primers.
To add to this, yeah, since contrast or speedpaints are very translucent, they don’t work on darker primers. White can be a tricky primer in general, since no matter what company you go with, it can spatter and speckle. Citadel’s “Wraithbone” is a really good rattle can since it’s not quite white and not apt to speckle, but is still light enough to let speedpaints show through.
AP’s primers are good, but their white (like all white primers) can be hit or miss. I like Vallejo’s, but whatever you have accessible!
AP grey is also good, but it’s tough for me to see where I’ve primed since it’s so close in colour to the actual mini.
Would you say that overall it’s better to use white or grey for speedpaints in your experience?
Any light colour is fine, with white giving you the most control over your colour.
Intuitively, adding, say, a brown speedpaint on top of a white primer will maintain the colour brown. If you were to put the brown paint on top of a black primer, it would be brown mixed with black, and combine to be, well, brown-tinted black. This is the case with any paint, since its colourspace is additive, but it’s especially so with translucent paints like speedpaints that show the underlying primer really clearly.
If your only two options are grey or white, I’d honestly suggest white. While I do still think Wraithbone by Citadel is a good middle ground, for a beginner, it is pretty tough to use grey rattle primer since it’s hard to determine coverage and is a fair bit darker than either Wraithbone or white, which can darken your minis considerably.
Here’s a good example from Army Painter as to how primer affects their speed paint colours, as you can see, the most accurate colours are acheived with a white primer. Just be careful, because as mentioned, white primers can speckle like the picture below.
You can’t fully avoid this, but your best way to prevent it is to make sure you have low humidity and no rain, shake the can very aggressively for a very long time, warm it up under warm water if possible, don’t spray in the cold, and spray in short, controlled bursts.
All great advice, thanks
I primed my Legion starter set white, and painted it with mostly Army Painter Speed paint 1.0. Only Vader was primed dark grey.
This is what it looks like.
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Hey, if you didn’t already paint all your minis I found great video with examples how you can use both speedpaints and various types of primed bases with zenithal trick for fast gradients: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT2JV3Ks41g
And here you have practical example how speedpaint works differently on different base colour: https://youtu.be/WjfHiwczl84?t=182
For the most part I airbrush Vallejo black primer.
If your using speed paints white all the way. You can use any matte white spray paint. Recommend doing a few test runs to get the hang of priming
You think straight white is a better choice than light grey?
Yep. I usually use a Rust-Oleum matte white rattle can when I’m planning on speed paints.
Light gray would work as well if you were planning to highlight with a white dry brush ala slap chop.
I really recommend you experiment and mess around. Paint can always be stripped, and honestly you can reprime over a paint job a few times before you start to lose detail.
Really? Can they be safely stripped even after applying varnish?
I haven’t had any problems. I usually use L.A. totally awesome from the dollar store.
LA?
Fixed the autocorrect
I personally paint mostly 3D printed minis for DnD and the occasional statue so YMMV
I typically use black primer with a sprits of grey from above to kinda act like an initial highlight layer.
Or just black depending on the model.
A big part of the primer IMO is that it gives a base coat and shadows for hard to reach places.
Happy painting!
