Painting Hints 1

This is my first post about painting.

I recently saw a thread in the Yahoo [mini-painter] group regarding the use of Gesso as a Primer for miniatures.

Jenn bought me some Liqidtex white Gesso. I wanted the white because it lets me prime whatever colour I want. If I want to prime black, I just add some black paint to the Gesso.

The application is pretty simple. I watered it down by about 3/5 and then covered the model with it. The model being a Kroot Shaper from Warhammer 40,000.

Once dried I found a number of places the metal was still showing through and some places were bare. So I applied a second coat and everything covered up consistently. I didn't notice any loss of detail.

The second test was an already painted Tau gun drone. The paint on it was pretty thick so I wasn't holding up much hope for it. I used a slightly thicker concentration this time, about 1/2 concentration. It came out okay. All of the panel lines were still visible but a little shallower, also the antennae had some Gesso fall off it onto the top of the model, creating a stalactite. But I can't complain too much.

The big advantage to using Gesso over an aerosol primer is that it doesn't require you to go outdoors to apply it, and you don't have to worry about a spray getting onto something else. Essentially there are fewer precautions you have to take in using this.

When I started using it I thought that if I had a lot of models I wanted primed, this probably wouldn't be ideal, and in the case of models that had large flat areas (such as vehicles) Gesso is not the way to go. After using it, the above opinion, hasn't changed.

I'm going to use Gesso for all of my individual models from now on. Especially the metal ones. It gives a lot of control to where the primer is applied.

I will try and add some pictures of my work.