LOPCO Blogs

The MVP Of Primer Colors

When painting anything on the exterior or the interior of your home and it has been established that a primer is necessary to use for the project, you may be surprised to learn on what my recommendation would be in terms of one specific element of the approach to primer.

Primers are used for a variety of reasons, but in a nutshell, their main use is to complete the setting of the stage for the finish coat after the prep has been done on a surface that is to be painted.

It is a product that is applied prior to applying one’s finish coat.

Essentially a primer is used to block something associated with a previous coating or the surface itself from bleeding through the finish coat or providing something for the finish coat to most properly bond to hence helping to ensure the best adhesion possible.


The default primer color is white and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.

Having a primer that is white, however, does make the finish coat a little more challenging to cover over the primer and may lead to the need for more effort in terms of product and labor to go into finish coating things than may have originally been planned on.

One way to make things easier would be to tint the primer.

At first glance, you may think that what makes the most sense is to tint the primer the exact color of whatever it is you are painting.

The thinking here is that if it is tinted the same exact color of whatever is being painted, then it would surely cover.

Yes and no.


It may very well cover, but it is often hard to tell the finish coat from the primer in these instances, especially when you are in the middle of applying coatings, and it is easy to miss an area where finish coat should be being applied or apply the finish coat not as thick as it should be due to no other reason as you can’t really entirely tell what is solely primer vs. what is the finish coat.

Then there is the thought of tinting the primer to a certain percentage of the finish coat color (example: 50% of the finish coat color).

While this is surely better than tinting the primer to 100% of the finish coat color formula as it will be much easier to see what was missed or not hit sufficiently enough with a ‘50%’ formula, it is often not the easiest to cover as you are in the process of applying your finish.

A ‘50%’ formula is much easier to cover over than ‘white’, but believe it or not, it is still not optimal.

So then, what would be best approach in terms of what color the primer should be tinted to?

I have found that ‘gray’ works the best.

Either a ‘light gray’, a ‘medium gray’, or a ‘dark gray’ work phenomenally, the choice to be used of these three would be dictated by the color of your finish.


If your finish is a ‘red’ as an example, ‘dark gray’ might indeed be your hero.

In fact, if you are open to it, I encourage you to even attempt an experiment.

Try painting something red and use two different primer colors prior to applying your finish – ‘dark gray’ vs. whatever other primer color (other than gray) that you want, including tinting a primer to be as close to the red finish color as you can get.

I guarantee you that it will not only take less coats to optimally cover whatever it is that you are painting, but when the finish product is completed, the item where the ‘dark gray’ primer was utilized will exude a “better” finish coat than the item where the other primer color was used.

Maybe this seems surprising or maybe it does not, but one thing is for sure, this trick of the trade can be a gamechanger once it is discovered and can save a whole lot of time, energy, and effort in your painting projects, particularly ones where there is some type of color change involved and a primer has to be used beneath the finish coat.

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