For the past 2 months all of my free time has been devoted to building a fairly massive Ork army for the tabletop wargame Warhammer 40k. Next month a local gaming store has a 'Casual Crusade' starting where you play a single narrative story line for 4 months on one of two teams. Over the months your army size grows, your units gain experience and injuries, and there are cinematic events to keep things interesting.
I will be joining the enemies of the Imperium of Man and, to do so, I've had to spend dozens of hours crafting, hundreds of dollars on kits and supplies, nearly as much time studying rules to be ready for week 1. This is not the kind of hobby I would recommend to anyone at all. You do this kind of hobby because you feel called to do so and because it's such a unique challenge. We are not here for an easy ride.
Priming is very stressful for me. It's one of the few times when you can spend less than an hour ruining months of work (if you screw things up).
For this army I'm going for a two tone priming job. This is most often called 'zenithol priming' in Warhammer and is most often used force shadows in the first steps of painting. This is done by covering your miniatures with a light coat of the primary color and then a second spray from the highlight color from 45 degree angle above the minis from the front. This will produce the effect of light hitting the minis from the front.
Ideally we want things to look like this:
Unprimed Vs Zenithol'ed
If, like me, you are looking at needing to paint an entire army it's very clear how much work this can save. As your (thinned) paints go on the miniatures they will not be fully opaque and these 'shadowed' areas will pull a lot of weight in making them look well detailed quickly.
Yesterday I broke out the cookie sheets and got to work. This was the result.
The gangs all here.
I opted to go for a primary coat of white primer with a light green hitting my orks. My warriors are bathed in the light of Gork (or possibly Mork, one can never be sure). I'm extremely happy with how this came out. There are some models that did not get 100% complete coverage but everyone was hit enough to make the coming painting step much easier.
Let's take a look at that highlight from a closer angle.
These boys are about to start a long career in battle. They deserve the gaze of Mork!
I'm very happy with this coverage. We've got the green tone without losing the white. This is much easier to see when viewing the miniatures from behind.
Grots eye view.
This is a huge win for my army and just in the nick of time. I'll be spending this weekend helping my in-laws move and will have no time for any crafting. I'm very happy to finally have a battleforce that all look relatively uniform and, how that priming is done, I get to enter the painting stage.
Painting these 100+ miniatures (we have x6 10-goblin squads of gretchin alone) is going to be a massive undertaking so I'm still wrapping my mind around how I'm going to tackle that to keep to moving forward but still fun. I hope you'll join me on that journey.
Please let me know if you have any questions and thank you for reading.