Operation: Rising to the Zenith¶
This should be fun, I thought.
Zenith: the point of the celestial sphere that is directly opposite the nadir and vertically above the observer.
After stripping the pre-shading, the next step is priming, i.e., creating a base layer on the miniature before “painting it by numbers.” Essentially you want to coat your miniature evenly with one basic color, either black or white.
I have opted to use spray can primers for this, anything that you can buy in your local shop. As I am a Swiss resident and a millennial, I have opted lazily to buy this white and this black primer from Galaxus 🙃 Both are matte in color, instead of glossy.
After that I was following my Bible-like tutorial video by Goobertown Hobbies1, which I will link in a lot of posts.
Apart from that, on the Discord thread for the painters of the HoMM3 Boardgame at the Archon Studios Discord, this picture has been circulated for zenith priming. I have tracked it down to a post from 2015 at Powerfisted, a Warhammer 30k & 40k blog2. Whether that's the original source, I don't know.
The idea is that you see how natural lighting would affect the model, i.e., how it would look like in a (grey)scale if the Sun would be hitting it from above. In case you are playing around with non-black/non-grey, you can achieve already astonishing effects with this simple priming technique.
In case you are using it as a base, it still adds flexibility to your painting later on, because:
- You see more of your model (just because of how our eyes work)
- You don't have to invent everything as you go with adding color, you see where you want to apply highlights, etc.
With all this being said, I have opted to experiment around:
- I only had white primer, so I skipped the second step with grey
- I did not apply it from the Zenith on all models, but played around with the angle from a "plausible light source" point-of-view
I am actually happy, how they turned out.
The pictures are before/after applying different point-of-view Zenithal priming on the paint-stripped minis.
Diplomat Commander
Land Commander
Naval Commander
Nuclear Commander
Space Commander
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Painting 201: Zenithal Priming at powerfisted.com ↩
