Priming With Acrylic Gesso
by Hyun (weetoysoldiers.com)Originally posted: September 19, 2005.
Last updated: February 27, 2007
Latest changes: Added some photos of painted miniatures that were primed with gesso.
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September 19, 2005
I first came across gesso a few months ago on TheMiniaturesPage.com discussion forum. At once I was intrigued: Here was something that could be brushed on, was non-toxic, water-thinnable and water-washup, and works wonders as a primer? I must investigate!
I had primarily used spray-can varieties of primers, anything from hobby-specific like the Tamiya Gray Surface Primer, to the hardware store-variety like OSH or Krylon or Rustoleum Painter’s Touch. They all work well more or less, but, in my opinion, have a few major drawbacks. One, the weather and lighting condition has to be right — too much humidity or too windy or too late at night, and you’re out of luck. Second, and more importantly, the solvent- and lacquer-based primers have nasty, often carcinogenic, toxic chemicals that I’d rather do without. Third, unless you’re really careful, it’s easy to overapply the primer and end up with buried/obscured details.
Gesso is a thick-ish liquid surface preparatory compound used to prepare artist’s canvass before painting. It contains finely ground chalk with some sort of glue or binding agent. Different brands of gesso are made differently — apparently some carry carcinogenic warnings, and some are certified non-toxic. I’ve also read that it’s made of plaster of Paris with glue. Either way, it provides an excellent adhesive “tooth” for paint to grab onto. I’ve been priming miniatures with gesso for the past six months, and have been very pleased with results.
Now, the obvious down side is that it is brush-applied, and thus, somewhat time-consuming. This may not matter if you are a sloooooow painter like me, for whom the measure of progress and achievement is not the number of finished miniatures, but rather a happily cluttered workdesk full of miniatures in progress. I’ve heard of people asking about airbrushing gesso, but I honestly wouldn’t recommend it — the mix is thick enough to guarantee blocking and messing up your airbrush. And if you thin it to the point of being able to somewhat successfully airbrush it with an external-mix airbrush, then I would venture to guess that it would lack the cohesion to act properly as a primer.
The local craft stores carry Liquitex brand (the only brand I’ve used) of acrylic gesso in white, black, and clear. You can tint the white and clear gesso with inks or paints of your choice (well, you can lighten black gesso as well, I suppose, but most people will find it easier to go from white to darker than black to lighter). I started out with white gesso and tinted it with black craft acrylic paint, to give a nice, neutral grey look. I thin it with Tamiya airbrush thinner, but you can also use distilled water. Liquitex website states that you can use up to 1:4 ratio (20%) of water to gesso to thin, and to use water and the Liquitex Matte Medium in equal amounts if thinning more than 20%. I’ve thinned it way more than 20% using the Tamiya Airbrush Thinner, but I’ve found that thinner gesso tends to get scratched off easily in handling.
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I eventually got a bottle of black gesso as well, as I found myself applying a coat of black ink wash to grey gesso-primed miniatures when I absolutely needed a black basecoat.
Here are my supplies for making primer mix — Gesso, Delta Ceramcoat craft acrylic black paint (99 cents at the local craft store), Tamiya airbrush thinner in a dispenser bottle, and of course, a mixing pot:
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Here’s a picture of a white-gesso-tinted-with-black primed metal miniature, from the Dark Age line of figures. The leftmost one is primed with gesso, then baremetal, then a figure primed with Tamiya spray can grey primer:
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“Product has been certified as non-toxic by The Art and Creative Materials Institute, Inc. and conforms to ASTM D-4236 Standard Practice for Labeling Art Materials for Acute and Chronic Adverse Health Hazards.”
There you have it. Obviously, if you have hundreds of figures to prime at once, or if you are working with smaller models (say 10mm and smaller) where any kind of primer might obscure details, it may not work for you. But if you are looking for a safer, use-at-any-time method of priming your miniatures, give gesso a shot!
Added: January 17, 2007
Over on TMP, there is a thread going on about using gesso as primer. As regular visitors of WeeToySoldiers may know, I’m a big fan of using gesso for priming figures for many reasons, not the least of which is that I like to paint late at night, which effectively precludes using spray can primers.
One poster, a user of gesso, commented to the effect that you don’t really need to add water or otherwise thin gesso. His exact words were “jam the gesso into the crevices and glop it on. Dries perfectly thin.” This piqued my interest, as well as (it must be admitted) a dose of skeptism. I’ve always thinned my gesso, and have gotten good results with it. Oh sure, usually you have to go back and touch up where gesso shrank and created bare “pinhole” spots, but that’s easily done (gesso shrinks as it dries, which makes it an ideal primer, as there is no or minimal loss of details). Thinned gesso also seemed more prone to being scratched off or otherwise damanged in handling, but I attributed that to just “gesso being gesso.” To be sure, painted figures that were primed with gesso seem to wear handling just fine.
So, my curiosity being aroused, I decided to experiment with non-thinned gesso, straight from the bottle, and furthermore, to “glop it on” and see how it’d dry. For the experiment, a brave Urban Mammoth Junkers Convict Legionary “volunteered”:
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Anyway, here’s the figure, two hours after the gesso was applied:
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The next two pictures show comparison shots of the head area, and the shield details:
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Added: February 25, 2007
Watching Paint Dry.
Well, actually, not paint, but gesso.
The section above on using non-thinned gesso has turned out to be quite popular, judging from the website statistics. A common refrain I see that it’s almost unbelievable how much gesso manages to shrink as it dries.
Well, wonder no more. Here’s an interesting time-waster for you to enjoy — a series of photos of gesso drying on a miniature! Thanks to the intervalometer setting on my digital camera, this was achieve with minimal fuss and also with far greater precision than anything I could’ve managed manually.
Basically, I set up the camera to take 100 photos in sequence automatically, one every minute. Then the figure was primed, and the camera activated. So we went from:
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There are two ways to view it. The first is a vertically scrolling webpage with the 100 photos (actually 101, including the shot of the figure before it was primed) in sequence. You can see that by clicking on the image below:
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