Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Thrud the Barbarian: Step by Step - Priming

Now we come to possibly the most boring stage of the painting process, priming.  No amount of flavor text is going to make this exciting, but that won't stop me from trying.  :-)
Of course, we all know that priming is a very important step in the miniatures painting process, at least if we want the paint to stick for any length of time.  Spray primer is the way to go unless you live in a place where you can never go outside.  It gives a smoother and more even finish than any brush primer I've ever found.  I generally use three colors of primer, white, black, or grey, depending on the paint colors that I'm using, what I have around the house, and my general mood on the day of the priming.  For light colors and pastels, I generally use white primer, as it makes the colors appear brighter.  For darker colors and heavily armored figures, I go with black as it can help out as ready made shading in cases like chain mail armor.   Finally, when I'm using colors somewhere in the middle, or I just can't decide, or I'm out of both black and white primer, I'll go with grey.  In the case of Thrud, I decided to go with black, even though he was going to be mostly flesh colored.  I knew that this would probably necessitate two coats for the flesh areas, but I decided that I was fine with that as it's a big miniature, and more coats are better for durability anyway.

Thrud primed and ready for painting
  
Next, we'll start with the actual painting!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

You primed the sand colored stuff on the base, too? Are you going to re-paint that later?

jrl755 said...

Yep. I prime the whole thing and then paint the ground to look like....well, ground. :-). Silly, I know. I have a forrest terrain piece hat I did, and I primed the big stones, then painted them to look like rocks.

jrl755 said...
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