501st Legion - Vader's Own

Even poorly painted miniatures put unpainted metal or plastic to shame, and our recent game of Imperial Assault made this point all too clearly.

I'd been intending to paint the models in my copy anyway but this put the spur to that aim, and so I've made a start.

Imperial Officer

 I kicked off with this chap mainly to make sure I was happy with a simple technique, as they are board game pieces for heavy use I've opted for a simple shaded glaze job.  On this Imperial Officer it's not terribly obvious, what with his dark green uniform.  The base edge is to identify his unit/activation card in gameplay.

This took no time and so I decided I could dig into one of the biggest tasks in the box; the Stormtroopers.

Blue Squad try to aim at the same target

Painting these fellows was simplicity itself, being a grey undercoat followed by several coats of white.  Once this looked even a 3 parts Vallejo glaze medium to 1 part Strong-tone Quick Shade wash mix was applied to the models.  Thinning down the tone with glaze ensured that all the detail wasn't swamped, whilst using a dark shade of tone guaranteed definition.

After that a relatively thin coat of black was applied with a fine brush to all the relevant areas.  Next a little white was retouched and added as highlights to the helmets and limbs, then various vents on the helmet had a touch of dark grey added. Finally, the same was lightly dry-brushed to the guns and gloves for some definition.  Job done.

In fact I was able to do all nine of the troopers as a batch quite quickly:

All three squads try to aim where their officer is pointing

Now to apply a couple of layers of varnish (I often take photos before applying varnish to models).

Really pleased with how nice the Stormtroopers have come out, it isn't until you add the black definition that the models come to life.  Next up I shall start on some of the models specifically required for the next campaign scenario.  I get to do a couple of corkers for that one...