Ken Collier: Primers are one of the great tools to help you get a beautiful paint job inside your home.

My name is Ken Collier and I'm the Editor-in-Chief of The Family Handyman magazine the leading brand for do it yourselfers. In this video I will walk you through how you can use primers to help you paint when you're going to make a drastic color change. Especially when you're going to use a one of the dark reds, dark yellows, one of the intense shades that's so popular now.

For these paints they are typically made with a clear base, so they don't hide the underlying color very well. This is what a primer will do for you, it will help hide the underlying color and give you a good base for the deep color that you are going to use as a top coat.

You have a couple of options for what primer to use. You can use a premium latex primer and have it tinted to match your final color choice, your paint store home center can do this for you. It would typically be either a lighter shade of the color you're using or for particularly intense colors that might be a gray primer.

Your second option is to use a premium primer paint combination; this product will cover the old color in just two coats. The first coat priming and hiding, the second being your top coat. To show you how this works, we'll roll on two coats of this deep red paint primer combination over our yellow walls.

This is going to be a sample swatch just to show you how it works, normally of course we cut in along the ceiling and the base and in the corner. For intense colors, you want to make sure you have enough paint on the wall but not too much, you use too little, you won't get good coverage and too much and paint color will be dull. There is one coat of our little sample swatch, but let this dry and then apply a second coat and see how it looks.

So our little test patch here is done two coats of primer paint combination and you can see the red looks perfect, looks just like the color chip not a trace of the yellow showing through it. If you're looking at a dramatic color change on your walls especially if you're going to be painting a really dark deep color, you should use the primer, a tinted primer or one of the new primer paint combinations.