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 decided early on that if I was to go imperial forces, I’d want to have the bases themed around Endor. So I looked up a few images if the California redwood forests to get some references.
The photo above really shows the colours I was interested in including: a variety of greens for live vegetation and the red/orange/brown of the dried needles littered all over the ground.
For the greenery I was well equipped, with a variety of flocks at my disposal, but I had nothing for the needles, so I decided to experiment.
In Western Australia we have a very abundant variety of eucalyptus called Jarrah which has a fairly distinctive red wood. I wondered if sawdust from this wood would be suitable for what I was after. The wood is used a lot on construction and furniture making here and I have offcuts on hand ready to sacrifice for a good cause.
On went the dust mask (don’t breathe this in is good advice for any sanding) and out came the sander. The sander has a handy collection box at the back which made getting enough sawdust quick.
The result is this very fine power which is bang on colour wise I think. And there’s plenty more where that came from (if you live around here).
Onto basing!
I started the bases with a textured paint I made from Vallejo White Ground Texture and a mix of inks, ratio of roughly one of the palette divet’s worth of texture, to 6 drops black ink, 6 drops red ink, 6 drops green ink, and 2 drops yellow ink.Spread the mixture all over the basesI pressed down some sticks while the paste was still wetI covered all of the base in watered down mod podge, then successively sprinkled small slate, Woodland Scenics light green coarse turf, darker green medium turf (no idea who makes it, had it for years), Woodland Scenics burnt grass fine turf, Woodland Scenics green grass fine turf and finally an all over coating of the jarrah sawdust Here’s the effect after this stepAnd here’s the good camera photo after a coat of Mig matt varnish.
I don’t always varnish my models, but I wanted to anchor down the relatively lightly glued down basing materials. Unfortunately it darkened down the sawdust quite a bit so it lost some of its red effect. On the models where more sawdust got added it retained quite a bit of the red however so that’s a lesson learned, more is better in this case!
Overall I’m very happy with how these bases turned out, I think they managed to look pretty natural and the effect is close to what I was chasing.
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.
Step 1: Undercoat! I started with an all over spray of Grey Surface Primer from Vallejo, then a zenithal spray of Vallejo Dead White. The effect is pretty subtle, so it might make more sense to not bother with the zenithal step.Step 2: Contrast! I’ve been eyeing off Citadel’s Apothecary White since the contrast paints were announced, and I finally get to use it. I covered the whole model, then went back over with the brush to smooth out and soak up areas that were a bit too flooded.Step 3: I used Vallejo’s Gunmetal for the blasters and the backpack on the DL-19 trooper.Step 4: I painted the cloth areas in a 50:50 mix of Vallejo Dark Sea Blue and Army Painter Matt BlackStep 5: More contrast, this time with Black Templar, over all the metallic areas and the cloth areas.Step 6: The longest step! I repainted the raised areas of the armour with Kimera’s The White, which has a nice heavy pigment so allows me to go much faster on this step.Step 7: I add chips to all the metallic areas with Vallejo SilverFor the squad leader’s pauldron I basecoated in Vallejo Parasite Brown, shaded with Citadel Agrax Earthshade and Highlighted back with Parasite Brown.
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.
With only the two characters left to paint, I was very motivated to finish the army this weekend. This scheme is very quick to paint which meant I could fit both in today. First up the Cryptek:
I’d actually painted the cryptothralls a while back, but I wanted to have the Cryptek finished before posting them. This model has a lot of ornamentation (most dominating of which is that cloak), and I settled on painting it all in the brass colour I’ve been scattering throughout the army on emblems and loose wires.
The warlord for the army, a Skorpekh Lord, is up next:
This model is very cool, incredibly imposing, and was pretty fun to paint. Each arm has a different weapon, which adds a lot of variety, and he ended up with every technique I used on the army (glowing weapon, glowing orbs, and power sword), which seems fitting as he leads it.
Finally, here’s a group shot of the army as it stands:
I ran out of space in my usual photography area, so I had to improvise with this photo. I’ll have to figure out a better solution in the future for army shots.
I’m planning at some stage to grow the army up to 2000 points, but not for a little while. I’m a little burned out on painting robots, so I’ll be moving on to another project soon.
The big guy himself is finally done. This is one of the models from the new range that really inspired me to get a necron force done, loved it as soon as I saw the previews. And when I saw it was bigger than the reanimator model I was very excited to say the least.
The large base was a lot of fun to populate, I got to use full stems of the aquarium plants rather than a few leaves.
I used the same sort of speckled light sources I did for the reanimator, just on a slightly larger scale. Here’s a close up of the lights of the main “reactor” for lack of a better word.
This was the largest model in the army by far, but painting it was relatively quick overall. I now just have two characters to paint and the 1000 points is done!
I finally got around to painting the destroyers from the Indomitus set. Very cool models and the first models with “power sword” style weapons, which meant needing to come up with a way of painting those. I’d settled pretty early on on using the same sort of colours as I used on the glow parts of the models, but only really decided to go with the by the book power sword look as I stated painting these models.
Photographing these was a bit of a challenge as I varnished the blades to give them a bit of protection (glazes do not bond very well to models and can rub off pretty easily), and even though I used satin varnish the glare from the lights was quite strong. I found a solution in the end which was to place my lights much further back than I usually do, reducing their intensity.
With these models finished, I only have three models left to paint to reach 1000 points, two characters and the Doomstalker.
I started this blog a few months back, mostly as a way to share my hobby in a longer form than twitter posts. I was a bit of an experiment and I rushed choosing a name at the time so I could get going ASAP. Now that I’ve found myself enjoying the process I’ve put in a bit more time into choosing a name and designing a logo for the site.
I’ve always liked rabbits, in fact most of my online handles in the past have been rabbit related (as a result of owning many pet rabbits as a teenager), and I love that the name of their order sounds like something straight out of a DnD monster manual. Add in my inability to resist alliterations and Lair of the Lagomorph was born.
From a design perspective, the logo is an amalgam of old gaming inspirations. Think old roleplaying games, and the Citadel logo to some extent. The font is Berry Rotunda, an open source font that fit the part very well. The skull is of course a rabbit skull!
I’m hoping the address change didn’t break too much, but if it did, better do that early in the life of the blog!
I made some more progress on my Necrons, with the latest addition a Canoptek Reanimator. I had a ton of fun painting this model, the Necron walkers are definitely my favourite models in the new range, I just love the idea of them stalking around.
The model came with bits of metal modelled on the base, so I decided to paint them completely rusted as I would expect to happen in a wet environment like a jungle. A few of the other models in the range come with extra base detail like this (including the Canoptek Doomstalker that I will be painting up soon!) and I’ll keep the rusty theme for these as well. I think it works nicely with the green of the bases.
Here’s a group shot of the Necron army as it currently stands:
I’m slowly but surely getting closer to having 1000pts painted up and ready for games. Here’s the list I’m aiming for:
That leaves the 2 characters, destroyers, cryptothralls, and the doomstalker to paint. All up 8 models left, so I’m definitely most of the way there!
The final member of this small nurgle warband is this sorcerer, who will lead them in their future skirmishes.
I had a lot of fun painting this model, tried a few new techniques, mainly blending with really thinned down pain through the airbrush after finishing highlights. I used purple mainly, mostly to smooth out the highlights on the cloak. I’m keen to try that technique out further on future models as I really enjoy the results.
Just like with the Blightkings I posed him in some terrain for an atmospheric photo, with a few more traditional shots after.
Lair of the Lagomorph 