Chris Salzman asked David Erik Nelson:

Something I always gets stuck on is finishing touches on projects, specifically when it comes to painting. Do you have any advice on what paints work best with what materials?

David Erik Nelson My mom is a trained painter (the art kind, not the house kind--although she's a hella rad house painter, too), and so I was indoctrinated early on in with a firm and abiding faith in primers, base-coats, gesso (opaque white base coat used to prep canvasses; it's basically thin plaster, and not that different from White-Out), etc. What impressed me as a kid was how gesso transformed surfaces: Once you laid out a good, smooth coat of gesso you could basically decorate that surface with whatever you liked: pencil, crayon, paints of any formula, etc. Same with primers: It ain't the paint, it's the primer. Once a surface is properly primed, it is an accepting canvas. And the king of primers is Kilz. I've yet to meet the surface--plaster, drywall, wall-board, woods of all varieties, plastics, rocks glass--that couldn't be Kilzed into submission, and then painted with whatever pigment you like. Apply a good primer, my son, and sin no more.

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