Adventures in Contrast: Star Wars Legion - Droideka Armor

Welcome back to Adventures in Contrast, where I show you all sorts of little tricks and techniques that you can do with Citadel Colour's Contrast paint system! The Clone Wars edition of Star Wars Legion arrived at my house thanks to my friend Dusty recently and I've been working my way through painting it all. My main objective for this project is to paint the models to a table top standard, without worrying about spending a ton of time on the. Especially since the droids and clones all are pretty simple paint schemes already. With that in mind, I'm using flexing Contrast paint to my advantage as much as possible.  In this article we will be looking at the Droideka and how to paint their bronze armor plating using Contrast. Let's take a look!

The Droideka are one of my favorite types of Separatist droid in Star Wars. When they first appeared at the beginning of The Phantom Menace I was instantly hooked on them. I mean, it has a force field, massive fire power and it turns into a ball!

Awesome.

Unlike their B1 cousins, the Droideka have a mainly silver skeleton, which I've already taken care of by drybrushing the model with Citadel Leadbelcher and Stormhost Silver.

In this article we're looking at painting the bronze armor plating on him. This is done by first painting the model with silvers, followed by Contrast to give it color. To get that rich reddish metallic tone, we're going to use Flesh Tearer's Red and Gor-Grunta Fur over a metallic surface to make that happen.

For this project you'll need the following:

Citadel Leadbelcher

Citadel Stormhost Silver

Vallejo Air Aluminum

Citadel Contrast Flesh Tearers Red

Citadel Contrast Gor Grunta Fur

This all comes together in the following steps:

Base: Black To get started on the bronze sections, we start with a base of black. We need the black base for the next few steps of silver that are to follow.	Drybrush: Leadbelcher Next up, drybrush the area with Leadbelcher. You can do as much or as little as you'd like. But if you leave darker areas it will help with the overall look in the end.
Drybrush: Stormhost Silver Now we are going to do another drybrush of Stormhost Silver. This time, try to focus it on the areas where light would be hitting the surface the most, such as the top or near the ground to simulate reflected light.	Drybrush: Air Aluminum The final step before Contrast is to do a final drybrushing pass on your areas where you want the brightest highlight. I also make sure to hit all of the edges of the armor plating too. This cleans up the edges and acts as a bright point on the armor. Air Aluminum is perfect for this, because it is a very highly pigmented metallic.
Contrast: Flesh Tearers Red Now its time for Contrast! Layer on a wash of  Flesh Tearers Red. Try to get an even coat on the model, without excess pooling, while still getting full coverage.	Contrast: Gor Grunta Fur Once the previous layer of Flesh Tearers Red is completely dry, its time to layer on Gor Grunta Fur. As with the previous layer, try to keep an even coat.

And that's it! I love using Contrast for colored metallic armor, it makes it so much easier than using additives and such because it is literally metallic paint with a color on top.

That's it for now. Go wild and try it out! If you do, hit me up on Twitter with your results! I'm interested to see what people to with it.

Until next time, you can catch me on Twitter and Instagram. Where I'm always posting pictures of what I'm currently working on.

If you like what I do and want to support the site and my painting endeavors, you can do so over on Ko-fi. All it takes is $3 and it's much appreciated. Also, you can buy The Brush Wizard shirts and such over on my Teespring shop, where you'll find a growing selection of shirts and other goodies. 

Thanks for reading!