Category: Star Wars Legion

I’ve been painting up some longer duration projects recently and I’ve been needing a break to paint something quick as a change of pace to refresh myself (and feel like I’m making progress on something!).

This officer model is from the imperial specialists kit that comes with 3 other models: two droids and a comms specialist. I’ll be painting these up as I feel, when I need another break probably. One of my friends is keen to play “no named character” games, and this officer will lead my imperial forces when we do that.

The main problem I had to solve with this model was the colour of the uniform. As with the emperor, the colour of the costume and how it comes out on screen seem quite different to me. I looked through my Star Wars costume book to look for references and the uniform is clearly an olive green in the photos, while I always saw them as grey in the movies. I tried to mash the two together here, aiming for a grey with some green in it.

The shiny black leather is painted just like I do on all my models, with successive highlights of Vallejo Dark Sea Blue with more and more white mixed in.

This model is one of the soft plastic models that were made for the game and detail is lacking compared to hard plastic models such as Games Workshop plastics. Here the eyes were not really marked out, so I painted them where I thought they should go, an interesting exercise. I have a couple of the hard plastic sets for Star Wars Legion built and ready to paint, I’m keen to see what the details look like on those.

Here is the latest addition to my Star Wars Legion army, the famed bounty hunter Boba Fett.

This is a very cool model, I really like that they made him mid jump, as it really emphasises how different he is to the rest of the army.

He has a surprising amount of colour on him, more than I’d realised watching the movies. We have a book on the costumes that were made for the original trilogy that has a lot of photos of the Boba Fett costume, which was invaluable for this. I tried to stay true to the colours as much as possible.

There are a lot of different ways of painting chipped paint on metal pieces, and in this case I chose to first paint the chips in a lighter colour, then fill in the centre with a dark metallic paint (Vallejo’s Gun Metal in this case). I chose this method as it is what the prop makers in the movies did!

For the glow of the flames from the jetpack, I first used the airbrush to define the glow area using a bright yellow paint, and then darkened that back down with a glaze of orange paint. I chose to go this route as the orange paints I have access to are not opaque enough to sell a “lit up” effect. They would just end up adding a transparent orange layer over the dark green of the cloak which would end up more like a brown stain. Finally I mixed in some of that bright yellow into the orange to highlight back up the points where the light from the jets would project the hardest.

I painted the logo on the should pad pretty roughly, more to suggest the shape of the original design than anything else, the area is pretty small and the cloak half covers it so I’m not too worried about matching it exactly, it looks good enough on the tabletop.

This model was a fun change from the white and black of the rest of the army, and he really stands out from them on my display shelf. I have a few other models lined up to expand the collection, but these are mostly black, so back to normal!

Added another model to my painted Star Wars Legion collection, this time the emperor himself!

The model is mostly black robes, so there wasn’t too much to do on it. I recently re-watched Return of the Jedi, where the Emperor is almost constantly basked in the blue glow of the room he’s in on Death Star 2, and that’s what I’ve tried to represent here.

The robes and the skin both make heavy use of Vallejo’s Dark Sea Blue, to keep them both tied together with the same tones. For the skin, that Dark Sea Blue had more and more Vallejo Dead Flesh mixed in as highlights were applied, culminating in final highlights of pure Dead Flesh. The robes are a gradient from black, through Dark Sea Blue, to Dark Sea Blue with a small amount of white mixed in.

I’ve painted up the last model for my 800 point Star Wars Legion army: the AT-ST! This is the model that drove me towards playing Galactic Empire, so I was pretty excited when it arrived in the post. I painted it using standard armour painting techniques, using oil washes over a somewhat shaded grey coat I did using the airbrush. The chips were done with a sponge and a 50/50 mix of brown and black paint.

I mainly concentrated the weathering on the legs of the models, where I would expect most of the damage and dirt to be.

Here’s a photo of the finished 800 points. I’ll add to this army over time, to give myself more options during games, but this is a good starting point to try the game out.

After finishing the grunts it’s time for some villainy! Here’s my painted Vader. This model was rather interesting to paint, as it is almost all black, but has three distinct materials, cloth, leather, and hard plastic. I tried to highlight these differently to make them stand out from each other. Not sure if I succeeded, but I’m happy with how it looks. The glow was done the same way I did the glow on my necrons, using an airbrush for the glow effect itself and a brush on the lightsource (i.e. the light sabre!). Overall he took me around 3 hours to paint.

I’ve painted up the speeder bikes for my Star Wars Legion army. These we fun to paint, I had them in quite a few sub-assemblies, with pilot, bike, pedals, and camping gear all separate.

I painted the pilot, gear, and pedals in a rather standard manner (i.e. using regular paints and washes), but did the bikes the way I would paint larger vehicles like tanks, that is to say using enamel washes over an acrylic base coat with a matt varnish to seal the lot.

This leaves me with Vader and the AT-ST (When it arrives!) to paint to complete my 800 point army.

No a legion’s worth, but enough for my first draft 800 point list!

I painted 10 more Stormtroopers, two squads upgraded with a DL-19. This rounds off the three squads I’m planning to take in 800 points. The rest of the force is Vader himself, 3 squads of speeder bikes, and an AT-ST. The bikes are up next on the painting desk!

I pushed the sawdust a bit more on these and I’m happy with the result. Here’s some close ups of some of the bases.

I have three friends the were very keen to get into Star Wars Legion and it didn’t take much effort to coerce me into joining in.

I went back and forth on whether to get some rebels or the imperials, and it was very close, Fantasy Flight having done some Rogue One models that were very tempting. In the end though, the Imperials having access to the AT-ST model was the tiebreaker and it was time to jump in.

I started off with the instantly recognisable classics: the stormtroopers.

I have a fair few of these to paint (2 starter sets’ worth plus an extra squad so 5 squads all up!) so I made sure to document the process so I can get them all looking alike. I’m not going to kill myself getting them to an amazing standard, I’m aiming for a nice tabletop standard here. The steps I detailed below are pretty quick, I got the full squad to the standard you see in the photo above in a few hours.

Overall I’m happy with how these turned out, the balance between speed and paintjob quality sits about right for me. Next up is basing these models. I have a few thoughts on how I’m going to do that, but I’m still experimenting. The goal is to get a forest floor/Endor look to them, but unlike my necrons I want to avoid a painted base as much as possible. The bases I made for the necrons were my take on hyper green and mossy forest textures as I’ve seen in comics and anime (think Princess Mononoke and the like). For my Star Wars models I’m aiming for a more real-world natural look, based on scenes from the movie and photos of the forest the Endor scenes were filmed in. This means using materials and techniques I haven’t really used much in the past so I’m looking forward to learning an experimenting in that space.

I’ll put up an article when I’ve settled on a methodology.