DOES PRIMER ONLY COME IN WHITE?
Tinting your primer to get it close to the finish paint color is a good idea, especially when the new color has a medium-to-dark amount of pigment. First let's talk about a basic paint job. Two coats of finish paint for any painting project is a good place to start. When there has been repair (and there almost always is): like spackled holes and cracks or joint compound floated over the depressed areas left from scraped/peeling paint, then you figure on some priming, also. We usually finish spackling and plastering these areas by sanding and then "spot-priming", or rolling/brushing primer to cover the repaired spots. This neutralizes these areas and ensures that they will absorb the finish paint uniformly on the wall. If there have been extensive repair/plastering on a surface or it is newly taped drywall, then we will prime the entire plane (wall or ceiling).

If your paint color is an off-white or a somewhat light color (not really dark), then a regular white primer will be fine under two coats of the finish paint... your completed job will look good and the chosen color will be full and complete (nothing from underneath showing through). Some medium-density colors will cover nicely over a white primer, also: like greens, coffees, and yellows. But when you have chosen a dark, rich color it's a good idea to "color" the primer, too, so you can avoid lots and lots of coats of the finish paint.

ALL I COULD SEE WAS RED
A Client of mine once chose a really, really rich red... I believe the manufacturer named it "Hunting Coat Red". Up until this point we always tinted our primers ourselves for dark finish paints. And we thought we had a fairly close red primer up and ready when we applied the finish paint. Six coats later and our red primer was still bleeding through somewhat.

Custom color your primer. I brought my woe to the owner of the paint store where we got all our stuff. He suggested that they could tint the primer to match the finish paint. I was surprised. "You can do that? And for me?" I asked. "Matt, we do it all the time. As long as we know the number/name of the finish paint custom color. Just figure on a couple of bucks added to the price of the primer for the pigment." Since then we have done just that when the job called for a really dark finish paint: had the primer also mixed, along with the custom color, to the same tint by the paint store. And it works great! Primer coat and two coats of the paint. And except for one more really, really deep red that we came across last summer (requiring three finish coats after the custom-tinted primer) any dark paint color covered completely, giving us a wonderfully rich paint job.

SHELLAC, BY ANY OTHER NAME, IS JUST A BUG
Pen marks on the wall??! Have you ever tried to paint over them with a latex (water-based) paint? Any mom or dad knows what I'm talking about (children love to write on the walls and some are even encouraged to). An electrician in San Francisco that I liked very much seemed to have a blind spot about pen on the walls. No matter how many times I asked him not to, he and his crew would mark potential outlet and switch sites with a pen. (They would even occassionally doodle their plans in pen on the wall, wherever they happened to be standing for their discussion!) He really was a great guy but this was his only failing. If you are painting an oil (alkyd) based paint over pen then chances are it will cover, at least in two coats. Water (latex) paint, though, will not cover this in five, six, seven coats... the pen will continue to bleed through!

Which brings me to the solution for this problem, if you encounter it. A little insect called laccifera, or just plain lac bug, secretes a resinous substance that protects its eggs. Unfortunately for the lac bug, people discovered that this substance, when dissolved in alcohol, forms an excellent stain killer known as (yes, your guessed it) shellac. We keep a spray can of clear shellac in our painting tools bucket for just these situations. A light spray coat can be re-coated withing five or ten minutes and will seal ink or marker in nicely. Then the finish paint can go over a dried shellac spot usually within a half an hour or so.

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