Adventures in Contrast: Star Wars Legion - Phase 1 Clone Trooper

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 flexing Contrast paint to my advantage as much as possible.  In this article we will be looking at the pride of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Phase 1 Clone Troopers Let's take a look!

White armor is the bane of many a wargaming painter. It either ends up very chalky, strangely blended or stays as a plain solid white surface with no depth in it. White doesn't like being painted over other colors, especially not darker tones.

But no more thanks to Contrast. Now we can get a very nice looking white armor on our armies with a extremely simple tabletop quality paint job.

This all comes together in the following steps:

Base: Corax White We are going to get started on the Clone Trooper by priming him with Citadel Corax White, but any flat white primer should be OK. Make sure that you get a nice even coat on the entire model, as this is the basis of the entire paint job. This is why I'm painting him without his arms on.	Contrast: Apothecary White Next up, give an all over wash of Apothecary White Contrast paint on the mini. Let the paint fill the recesses, but try not to let it pool up on surfaces too much. If it does pool, that's not the end of the world though. A few of the Clones I've painted have pooling on their chest armor and after edge highlighting, it still works.
Edge Highlight: White Once the Contrast layer is completely dry, we're going edge highlight all of the armor plates with Vallejo Model Color White. This does two things. It makes the grey in the Contrast act like a shadow and the bright white highlight makes your eye read the armor as a brighter white surface in general.

And that's it! Nice looking white armor without the hassle! Finish him off with a few details, such as weathering, rank/company markings and black sections to the rest of the uniform and he's good to gooooooo. You can even add a bit of gloss to him if you'd like the armor to pop a bit more.

This fella is a member of the 501st under Captain Rex and Anakin Skywalker, so I used some very handy 501st references to match that company's markings to his armor. I also added a bit of mud and weathering to him as well to give him that worn Star Wars uniform.

I still need to finish off his base, but I usually wait to do an entire squad in one go, so they match as closely as possible. So 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. I'm always happy to talk shop and answer any questions you may have as well.

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!