"Primer on Primer – Your opinions please" Topic

I am painting some 20mm WWII vehicles and plan to use Army Painter colour primer. Here is the question: Does it make any sense to prime it white first and then hit it with the colour primer? Would the white undercoat give me a brighter mini? I intend to wash the top primer coat and highlight, so brightness at the start is a good thing. A truer representation of the colour. Anyway, that is my thinking. What do you think?

If your 20's are hard plastic or metal, my inclination would be to just use Army Painter and be done with it. It's a good opaque primer and your color is fairly bright anyway. On a soft plastic, I'd either go to a paint shop for a specialist primer or revert to the old "acrylic paint and PVC glue" technique.

But I'm not the one who has to be satisfied with the final result. No law against doing a small trial batch first before you begin mass production. After all, not all WWII Army Green--OK, O.D.--vehicles were or remained the same shade.

I'm assuming you're applying your primers in thin, multiple coats to achieve a solid, opaque finish. While experimenting with the various primers and paint-primers (zenithal application) I have in aerosol cans, I never noticed any difference between applying a color primer by itself versus applying it directly over a different primer – I am only taling about the direct area of the zenithal spray, not the other areas where the colors blend together.

The value of a primer over regular paint is that it prepares the surface better

So I would go straight with the color you want. If that comes out too dark for you, you're not going to get better results unless you go to an airbrush. Even if you underpaint with white, it's probably not going to come out very even if the AP primer is super thin

John