Zenithal Priming in Miniature Painting

Zenithal priming is the act of painting miniatures to be primed from above rather than all around. This leads to less paint on the model and smoother surfaces. However, it also means that more care must be taken when applying paint because you can’t always get into hard-to-reach corners with your brush.

John Blanche pioneered this technique on Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 line of the miniatures game. It has since been used across many different scales and genres of gaming, including Warmachine/Hordes by Privateer Press and Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures Game by Wizards of the Coast.

What is Zenithal Priming?

In traditional undercoating, a miniature is primed from all sides. This allows you to get paint into every nook and cranny on the model. However, it requires a thick coat of primer which takes more time and ultimately covers up many fine details of detail sculpts.

Zenithal priming solves this problem by priming from the top down. This allows you to prime your miniature with a much thinner coat of primer, which means all those fine details are preserved and don’t get “lost” under a layer of thick primer.

How does it work?

To prime a miniature using zenithal priming, you must imagine that you’re shining a light down on the model from its highest point. Then use only enough primer to cover all of the dark areas. The lighter areas will be untouched by any paint and stay white like the “highlights” in traditional painting.

Why should you care about Zenithal Priming?

Zenithal priming is a fast way to prime your miniature. You can prime nearly everything with just a couple of coats from the top down, which means it’s easy to get into those hard-to-reach corners on things like weapons and helmets. Another benefit is that the primer only needs to be as thick as the “shadows” on the miniature, so getting a smooth surface compared to traditional priming methods is much easier.

The dangers of Zenithal Priming

Zenithal priming has some downsides, too, however. The biggest one is that you are limited in how far your paint will reach into the miniature. Since you’re only painting the areas that are “dark” or below your light source, there’s no way for paint to infiltrate any of the sites above your light source.

Things to keep in mind when zenithal priming

When doing zenithal priming, it’s important to remember where you want shadows and highlights on your model to be since this determines what you prime with. For example, if you have a sword arching over a miniatures head, you don’t need highlights on the head since they’ll get painted anyway. However, you would want to prime the arching sword with a darker shade of gray since that is in its own shadow.

The most important thing to remember when zenithal priming is that if it is done correctly, only “a few” parts of the model need actual paint. Careful planning with your light source can reduce or even eliminate painting areas of miniatures, which will significantly speed up your painting.

Zenithal Priming Using an Airbrush

I’ve read about people using airbrushes for their zenithal priming technique. Still, I’m not sure how successful they are at achieving smooth finishes or how much work would be involved with repairing any mistakes made during spraying. As for using your standard painting setup to achieve zenithal priming effects, it’s deceptively simple. The only difference is you must visualize the light source coming from above.

To begin, I like to lay down a flat coat of primer onto everything I plan on putting paint onto

This smooths out any imperfections in your miniature’s surface and allows you to cover up mistakes easier if they are made during the following steps. From here, it’s good practice to shoot for lighter shades of gray at the top of the piece, darker shades towards the bottom since that’s where most shadows will be occurring naturally.

As always, care must be taken when applying paint to miniatures, but with this technique, you have one area that can potentially be an issue; white spots. Since this is your light source, you want to make sure to cover it up entirely with paint or primer (if you sanded the primer away).

What I like best about zenithal priming is that if something goes wrong during a painting session, all you have to do is reprime the miniature and start over from scratch, so it’s infinitely easier than fixing mistakes on traditional priming methods. It also allows for some exciting things such as “washes” since the washed areas will be going over already primed regions that are darker in color. This can result in some deep-shaded recesses that look great with washes, but only if done correctly! In my experience, however, washing miniatures using this method is very difficult, if not impossible.

The biggest downside to zenithal priming, I’d say, is the limitations it puts on your miniatures.

You are limited to painting only shadows and highlights where they would naturally occur, so trying to get super crazy with highlighting can be challenging without making things look weird. That being said, It’s still worth doing for me since the overall speed of my miniature painting has increased dramatically and makes thinning colors smooth and easy due to the layers already built into each color I apply.

To see some examples of zenithal priming in practice, you can check out my finished works here or head over to my Instagram account, where I’ve been posting WIP pictures.

Conclusion

It’s incredible to see how just a few colors can be used in miniature painting. The best part about this is that anyone can do it, and it doesn’t take any unique supplies! If you’re new at the art of Zenithal Priming or want some tips on how to get started, we’ve provided links for everything needed below. All you need are your paints, brushes (which you probably already have), an old book page or piece of cardstock paper for your canvas, something to paint on top like glass jars with lids…and maybe some patience if this is your first time trying it out. We hope these helpful hints will inspire others who may not know where to start when they look at all of those beautiful models out there…