Priming

When I first started modeling I used armory primer white, never had any problems until last year, now I'll never use one ever again. I trusted it to the point that I now have a full can of white and two full cans of black that are utterly worthless, I spent so long trying to brush the "crumbs" off a batch of orks that I lost interest in painting them, and after that experience I still have yet to go back and brush my necron objective markers that armory primer ruined. GW sprays may not be a legitimate primer but they work fine, I've never had a single problem with them. Airbrushing citadel foundation paint directly onto the model doesn't do a good job as a primer however it's so thin and fantastic to paint on top of that i'll keep doing it. I double coat most of my stuff with GW 'ard coat and I have yet to rub paint off any of my models (including ones that I directly airbrushed).

Smackman- What colour foundation paint do you airbrushfor an undercoat? Also, what do you thin the foundation paint with? I've avoided airbrushing Foundation stuff as I heard the extra pigment made it a real whore for clogging the needle, but maybe I'll give it a shot fi you've found good things. I'm interested in that for sure.

Also, is it only recently that everyone has had problems with the Armoury stuff? I've got a can of black that is just awful that I bought recently. All the grey primer that I really like is from a year or so (maybe more) ago. I had even bought some for a dude in Quebec, shipped it to him, and he loved it. He bought some for himself and said it was crap. That was about a month ago too.

Scott, yeah it's about 8 months ago that I started getting crappy results from armory primer, before then it was great, they must have changed the recipe, too many herbs and spices now I guess.

I did a batch of tanks a couple weeks ago and thinned it with 3:1 paint to isopropyl 70% Alcohol they turned out good. Water works, kinda, i've had trouble in the past but mixing 2:1 paint to water is what I started out with, however I found that I'd need to do 3 coats generally to get a good finish, with isopropyl two coats gets the color and coverage I'm looking for. I'll throw up some pics on monday in my project blog of stuff I airbrushed with water or isopropyl and theres not much difference in the finished product but isopropyl was way easier to work with. Water definately clogged up my airbrush a few times and I had to thoroughly mix inbetween coats, for how cheap it is to pickup a 1L jug of isopropyl I'd highly recommend it.

Also a note is that my friend uses Tamiya acrylics with Tamiya acrylic thinner through an air brush, the finished product is great, he swears by it, but it's definately a more expensive route then isopropyl as the thinner is the same price as the paint.

I might give that shot Smackman. Though I really, really like the Vallejo Model Air paint for airbrush work they're some nice colors in the Foundation range I haven't really found anything similar too. Charadon Granite for sure. I'll give it a shot. TY!

I've never tried any Vallejo paints scott so I'm not sure how they compare.

Vallejo has two ranges, Game color which is all direct rip off of the last range of Citadel paintsd complete with wierd rip off names (Bald moon Yellow as an example) and I am underwhelmed with them. I bought the set as I prefer the dropper style bottles vs. the flip tops and I had heard good things quality wise. They're a few lemons in the set, but more or less about the same I found with the latest citadel paints.

Vallejo Model color is da bomb. It's historical colors, they dry very matte, and they have a little more pigment than the typical gamer oriented paints. I love them. The Den doesn't sell the range BUT they have some singles from Flames of War set's they've cracked open. I strongly reccomend picking up a few of them to any that are interested. There's a handful of paints that I use on every model. Cam. Black Brown for sure. The thing these paints don't have is the resin that get's mixed into a lot of the game paints like P3 and GW. Which is why a good primer is even more important if painting gaming stuff with the Vallejo Model color paints. The VMC Black is the best around! So many of they're colors are great. It sucks the den doesn't carry the range. But they do special order them in now.