PG Strike painting questions

[lastexile]

heya all, first time poster, but I've been lurking these forums awhile. ran into a bit of a bind and hope someone here might have a good suggestion.

I recently picked up the PG Strike and am working on painting most of the parts, but to my surprise the majority of the white pieces are actually more of a light gray than a pure white (i.e. freedom white). I typically use the Tamiya Spray pearl white for white pieces as it gives off a nice sheen when it dries, but I'm having trouble getting the paint to stick on the light grey (testing it on the empty runners.). I tried using some dark grey Tamiya surface primer on some of the empty runners to test if the white would stick on the dry primer but I guess the primer is a bit too dark as I'm not having much luck.

So my question is, what should I do to get the white paint to stick without ending up looking ugly. I was thinking of buying a can of the lighter gray primer that I saw on the Tamiya site and trying my luck with that, but I'd love to hear what other people have done first.

[SNT1]

From my experience, pure white is just awful hard to paint, whether it's handbrushing, spraying or airbrushing. A few more coats of white may be necessary to cover the painted parts thoroughly. Also, using Tamiya White Surface Primer instead of Tamiya Grey might lessen the recoating efforts.

[James E. 'ZEE' Doyle]

Never use dark primer under pure white. Never, never, never.

Also, white paint that's even marginally tinted covers a lot better than pure white, in my experience. It also looks better on scale models too (the PG Strike shown on the kit box is definitely not pure white). If you must have pure white, however, I'd go with the lightest primer possible and then do an undercoat of off-white before laying down the final pure white coats.

[lastexile]

appreciate all the input! I'll probably pick up that light grey primer tomorrow then. would anyone reccommend a white spray to use? I picked up a Tamiya matt white spray can today, but have yet to test it.

[Koshernova]

I usually like matt tones in my models, so while some may scoff at it, I go for white primer spray, evenly coated. Caveat: This is done on parts that are already white...