 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video, and today we're going to talk about an age-old debate in the hobby. To prime in black, or to prime with a zenithal scheme, and which one is better. Secret. They're both good. Let's get into it. Okay, let's start with a basic explanation of terms here. First in case you're not familiar. When I say priming in black, that's pretty obvious. That means you take your miniature, you apply a primer layer, a video on primers, linked up in the top corner if you want more exploration of this, and you prime it just completely in a solid black color, effectively setting all your shadows your lowest possible tone. This could be with a spray can, something like Chaos Black from Games Workshop, or an airbrush, or a brush on black paint, or anything. It doesn't really matter. But the figure is now ready for painting in one solid dark black color. The other version of this is called zenithal. Zenithal priming, or grise, or something like that effectively means a black to white transition where the white is coming from above, creating a white to gray to black gradient over the miniature. So on the detail of zenithal priming, also linked up above. So now that we understand the two basic things we're talking about here, let's get into some specifics. Both priming methods are perfectly valid. I want to start right there. So don't believe anybody who tells you that you must prime in only one way or another. That's simply not true. However, there are benefits to each type of priming and particular situations where you may want to do one or the other because it's going to make the rest of your painting easier. It's going to set you up for success. And that's what we're going to hone in on today. When do you use each type of priming? That was a quick side note. There are of course other methods of priming than this. There are single coat colors of using base coat them in just red or just yellow or something like that. You're doing ultramarine so you spray them all blue. That's all fine. Of course that's out there as well and perfectly valid. I talk about some of that in the priming video I linked earlier. There's also other color tones you can use for zenithal so it doesn't have to be just black to white. All of those are fine and can have uses, but I wanted to focus our conversation today just on black versus zenithal as these tend to be the two major ways, especially newer people tend to think about priming in the hobby and I want to really help people understand what the difference is here. A lot of what I'm saying about black is going to be true for single color and a lot of what I'm saying about zenithal is going to be true regardless of the specific colors you happen to create that gradient in. Let's start with a base understanding. All priming can help you read the figure. One of the advantages to zenithal versus black is that the miniature just becomes easier to interpret for your eye to resolve. All the little details pop out and frankly a lot of modern miniatures are really complicated. They have a lot of micro detail and tiny doodads and bejangles and all sorts of other things like that. I'll be honest, I'm old and my eyes aren't what they were when I was young and they've never been good to begin with. I've worn glasses since I was 16, so it's just generally something that can help you actually resolve and see, hey, what's going on on this miniature in a way that a pure black prime does not because it's a single color and doesn't show all of the detail as well. If you're going to prime in just black, I do recommend to help with this problem. You use either a satin black primer, so chaos black has a little bit of satin sheen to it. That's one of the reasons it's quite nice, meaning it's shiny. It's a slightly reflective black primer. Or use something with a little more gray in it. For example, I use through my airbrush the Balejo Surface Primer German Panzer Gray that because it's a little more gray, a little more light bounces off the model, which is what the satin will also do. That will help make the model more readable. In either case, what you can do is with the Zenithal or with just a satin or slightly gray prime that you then hold up to your bright painting light. You can then take a photo of it under that lighting situation and that can help you resolve volumes and highlights and placement later. I cannot encourage you enough that when you have a prime to many, especially if you're newer and you're not quite sure on where highlights go or how to resolve them, to put that under your bright painting lamp, get out your cell phone, snap a quick picture. Then you have that as a reference point later, regardless of what paint you use or what steps you take from here. It can just make your life a lot easier. So regardless of primer, you can get that sketch. All right, let's drill in more on the Zenithal side of this and talk about some of the benefits of the Zenithal side. Zenithal priming is meant to represent an even diffuse overhead lighting. Think of walking outside during the day when it's maybe slightly cloudy, so you're not in direct sunlight. The clouds have sort of scattered the light to some degree, still relatively bright out. We're not talking overcast. That's what Zenithal is meant to represent. No incredibly harsh, sharp cast shadows, just a soft, even above lighting. This tends to often be good to represent indoor normal lighting scenarios as well, assuming you're not getting blasted by super bright overhead lights like I have in my office. Most of the situations we walk around in every day, whether it be interior in your home or outside, tend to be this kind of a lighting situation. General, even from above, diffuse lighting. Zenithal priming can really help you get a tabletop army out and done fast. It can be a springboard to speed painting. So, if you've got the need, the need for speed, this can be a great advantage to Zenithal because you can then combine it with transparent paints. This could be contrast paints or speed paints or inks or anything like that and resolve all your different values very quickly by just effectively tinting the white to black with the thin transparent hue color. Now, interestingly, this isn't necessarily true in reverse. If you're using paints with a higher opacity, it doesn't mean you should prime black. Those can still have value over Zenithal. A Zenithal prime being sort of gray to white to black, or as I mentioned earlier, any other color transition you use will tend to resolve your paints easier and quicker in their true color. What I mean by that is if you've ever had the experience of trying to paint red over black, you know that that can be frustrating. Red is highly transparent even when you're painting with full opaque base layer, whatever we want to call them, paints. And so pushing them all because all paints are translucent. So pushing even those over a Zenithal can still really help you apply less layers and importantly, resolve the color in a more true fashion more quickly. If you want your colors that are more warm but transparent, reds, yellows, oranges to really pop, even when using normal layer paints, not special contrast or things like that or inks. A Zenithal can really be a great start because it means that you don't have to build up a lot of intermediate layers to make those colors read as red, yellow or orange and can actually make them quite a fast, pleasurable, easy paint. A couple final notes on Zenithal priming. When you do this and you spray the white from above, either with an airbrush or with a rattle can, do note it's going to obliterate your upward shadows. What do I mean by that? Well, oftentimes if we're painting something that has fabric or armor, there might be panels in the armor or things like that. Even though these things are facing up, there are still shadows. That is to say separation lines of darkness in between the various elements of the miniature. Just as I have a shadow here around my collar, a slight dark line around the edge of my shirt, and so on. Those upward-facing dark lines often get obliterated by that top-down spray, so you may need to put extra effort into rebuilding those. Maybe through panel or black lining, maybe through pushing additional careful shadows, whatever it happens to be, those need to be represented, otherwise the paint job doesn't feel clean. If two regular base tones just meet in each other, with no occlusion shadow to separate them, then our eye gets the immediate sense that something is wrong. We're used to seeing shadows in the world in between the various elements, like between my sleeve and the rest of my arm. My final note of where Xenothal can work the best wonders is on what I'll call large flats. And I'm not talking about chicken wings, though that does sound delicious. I mean large flat areas, so this might be things like cloaks that are very soft, flat, billowing things. Could be big armor panels, all of that sort of thing. Those types of things can be a nightmare to resolve with a standard round brush. Because they're so big and the transitions so slow, and they can take lots and lots of layers to sort of build up into a smooth transition. Xenothal priming can make sure that that is a breeze, so even if you're using opaque or transparent paints later, it's still quite easy to resolve that and keep it smooth. Okay, now let's dig in on black priming, and again remember, you can substitute this for any single color prime, but we're going to talk about black specifically since that's probably where most of us start. We often start with black priming, and then we learn about Xenothal, we get into it, and I've seen a lot of people just completely leave black priming behind. And that's fine, I would say I probably Xenothal 95-98% of the miniatures that I paint. There's nothing wrong with it. It's valuable for all the reasons I just mentioned. But that doesn't mean it's always the right answer, or it has to be the right answer for you. Black priming is a perfectly valid way to go about it, you just need to be aware of where it's strongest and where you're going to have to meet certain challenges head on. So let's start with where it's strongest. Black priming is strongest when you need any kind of other lighting situation besides a diffuse overhead light. Because that's what a Xenothal is, it's outdoors on a slightly cloudy day. But if you're painting someone in a cave lit by a torch or campfire nearby, if you're painting a demon that has some kind of light of hell coming up from below, or a wizard with a ball of fire in his hand that's sort of glowing blue and casting on his face, you can picture all the different things you might want to do like that. Then Xenothal priming isn't going to serve you very well, because your undershade layer isn't actually the light that you're trying to resolve. You're often better to start from black and build into that specific lighting situation. I actually have a recent video on this, on lighting, you can find that linked up above, but it's a good example of exactly when you would want to start from black as opposed to an overall Xenothal. The next important area that you often want to start from black is what I will call complicated materials. So complicated materials are things like non-metallic metal, or anything else where the light doesn't frankly reflect across it in a soft diffuse pattern, even if the figure is meant to be under soft diffuse lighting. Bright non-metallic metal armor doesn't reflect like cloth, and the wide spray cone of an airbrush or a rattle can resolving a Xenothal gives you the feeling of soft diffuse light, like what happens over the cloth on my arm. There's no sharp reflection points, you're not blinded by any bright white lights for this shirt that I'm wearing. Because it's soft, it's matte, and it diffuses the light that bounces back to your eye. But shiny metal like my ring will bounce back bright lights. So if you're painting a lot of non-metallic metal or something like that, I would usually just start over black. Because my honest answer is, you need to take a finer control of the light volumes. All we mean when we say volumes, and that's real fun painter speak you've probably heard lots of us use, is what is the delta between the shadow and the light? How much of the area has brighter, lighter, more tinted paint to be capturing light? So when you need to have these very controlled, specific reflections and lights, i.e. non-metallic metal, OSL reflections, anything like that, black primer can serve you very well because you can then build up those little micro lights in tiny volumes. My recent rat cast are a good example of this. I started from black because the whole figure is effectively a non-metallic metal. And each little reflection on each panel and shape needs to be controlled. It's not a soft diffuse light situation. Laying down the white, even though I'm working with red, would have actually made my job harder. Because I would have had now two different lighting schemes conflicting with each other. I need to keep the areas of wide broad shadow volumes, while also having the light volumes be small and highly reflective to show the shine of this red metal. One of the other strengths here is the exact opposite of what I mentioned earlier. And that is to say the separation of elements. When you're starting from black and you're being careful with your base coats, that is to say applying paint to only the areas you want to apply it to, you can very naturally keep just a tiny little itty baby bit of that black in between all the elements. In between the chest armor and the gorget, or in between the shirt and the undershirt or whatever. Creating these small, soft, but pronounced black dark shadow lines or occlusion shadows between all the elements. It can really help give the piece a more clean and credible look. Without any extra need to resort to things like panel lining or anything of that nature. In other words, you don't have to go back and build the shadows in because they're already there, you just, those are the tiny thin areas you didn't paint. Another situation where you're going to want to use black primer and not a zenithal is when the entire figure is going to be painted in metallic paints. In fact, in that case, a zenithal primer or any other color but black can actually act against you. By metallic, I usually mean steels here, so this is something from traditional historical modeling where they would prime black, usually a very high gloss black and then lay the metal over top of that. And in fact, a high gloss or satin, at least black, can be an excellent base for a metal paint to go over top of increasing the shine. So there you go. That's my breakdown of black versus zenithal priming. I hope this was helpful and will really set you on the right path to choose the correct priming for your particular project. If you've got any questions or maybe additional value propositions for each thing that I missed, drop those down in the comments below. Don't forget, we have a Patreon you can join if you want to support this channel. As always, Patreon is for my learning and teaching, just other ways that I can share information with you. You can join a Discord and be part of a fun hobby community of great people and it helps me facilitate feedback and coaching for you in multiple different ways. If you liked this video, give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. As I said, I thank you so much for watching this one. And as always, we'll see you next time.