Brown, Black, and a Bit of Light: Chatting About Priming and Painted Gradients
We had one of those very relatable hobby conversations recently: starting from the practical question of priming, and ending with that familiar mixture of admiration and mild despair after watching a really high-level painting video.
Michał mentioned that he usually primes with brown or black spray. Honestly, that already says a lot about approach and mood. A darker undercoat gives a model a completely different starting point than the bright, clean styles we often see in tutorials. It naturally pushes things toward deeper shadows, richer tones, and a more forgiving base for the rest of the paintjob.
Then Stas dropped a painting video into the chat, and from there the discussion went straight into light placement and just how much difference it makes when someone really knows what they’re doing.
“That play with light is wonderful.”
That was probably the key takeaway for all of us. Not just “nice blending” or “good colors,” but specifically that the miniature looked alive because of how the painter handled light. It’s the kind of effect that instantly makes you stop and stare for a second longer.
And then came the most relatable part of the whole exchange.
While some painters are out there hand-painting every gradient, the rest of us are often still in the trenches trying to make the colors cover properly after priming already created some natural highlights for us. Stas summed it up perfectly: he’s here fighting for decent coverage, while the guy in the video is operating on a completely different level.
That contrast is such a classic painting experience. On one hand, we love techniques like two-tone priming because they do some of the work up front. They help define volumes, suggest highlights, and give us a roadmap before the brush even really gets going. On the other hand, seeing someone manually build every transition by hand is a reminder of just how deep miniature painting can go.
An interesting detail from the chat was the observation that the painter in the video also seemed to use two-color priming, but not in a classic zenithal way. Instead, it looked more like a more deliberate, directional light setup — jokingly described as something closer to “lamp-light priming” than zenithal. And honestly, that’s a fun way to think about it.
Not every light source has to come from directly above. Once you start thinking of priming as a way to establish a specific lighting situation rather than just “spray black, then spray white from top,” a lot of creative doors open. Side lighting, angled lighting, stronger focus on a face or weapon — all of that can influence the final paintjob before the first basecoat is even finished.
That’s probably what fascinated us most in this little exchange: the gap between using primer to help ourselves and using light intentionally as part of the painting itself. Both are valid, both are useful, but they sit at very different points on the hobby journey.
And maybe that’s the nicest part of conversations like this. We don’t always come away with a strict tutorial or a step-by-step recipe. Sometimes we just leave with renewed motivation, a new way of looking at undercoats, and the thought that maybe next time we prime a model, we’ll pay a bit more attention to where the light is supposed to be coming from.
If nothing else, it’s a good reminder that even before we start painting colors, we’re already painting light.