Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Wizardry in Progress 2/19/20

It's a very Star Wars Legion kinda time around these parts. I am deeeeep into this game at the moment and working my way through a bit of backlog of models so we can finally get the game on the table. This week I've been working on a few different character models as well as finishing up the Seperatists side of things by basing the B1 Battle Droids.

The goal is to be able to start playing the game asap and get some practice with the system, so I came possibly get some games in at Adepticon in March. I still have plans to add some Felucia style plant life to the bases as well. But I'll add that in at a later date.

But for now, let's take a look at what was accomplished this week.

Count Dooku

Darth Tyranus himself, the venerable Christopher Lee. Count Dooku is one of my favorite villains in Star Wars. Maybe it's because I also love Dracula and Lord of the Rings and Christopher Lee in general too. But especially after having finished Star Wars: The Clone Wars recently, Dooku is such a great villain. He's not a mustache twirling bad guy and seems to be fighting for his ideals, rather than just being a mook of Palpatine.

For Dooku's color scheme, I decided to stick closely to his Attack of the Clones outfit. Which is a black tunic and pants and black leather boots, with a brown cape. The main reason being that in Revenge of the Sith he wears a brown tunic and pants and my ground color is dark brown.

This way his cape goes along with the brown color of the ground, but his main outfit is a totally different color, allowing him to contrast a bit with the base.

Another reason for deciding on the black/grey color scheme is that I wanted the red of the lightsaber to add some color to his lower half and felt that if his suit was brown, the red may not
show up as well. As you can see the red did tint the grey cloth a bit on the brown side. I feel like this was the right choice.

Something I am extremely proud of on this model has got to be his face. Recently I've been having a bit of a crisis of faith when it comes to skin tones, which I've attributed to painting too much armor and not enough skin. So I went back to the well and looked up an old tutorial I used back when I was first working on improving my skintones. It worked out really well and I'm happy to report that I may be back in that saddle once again!

Clone Captain Rex

Captain of the 501st Legion of Clone Troopers, Clone Captain Rex is easily one of my favorite characters from that series and the reason I wanted to paint the other clone troopers as 501st to begin with. It also helps that I do really like Anakin Skywalker and whenever they decide to release him in game, I am so jumping on that bus as well... but anyway..

Rex's model comes with 3 head options allowing you to give him a Phase 1 helmet, his iconic modified Phase 2 helmet or bare headed. From a modeling standpoint though, the rest of his body is so obviously is late Clone War armor that I had to use the 2nd option. As I've been treating this Legion project as if I were painting historical miniatures and adhering to cosplay guides and film examples, I couldn't let myself mix the styles.

Rex's armor is packed with painted details that kind of go unnoticed at first. For example, his helmet has the blue markings that are highly visible. But I never really paid much attention the the fact that it's made of a Phase 2 and Phase 1 helmet being cut apart and welded back together, or that the light blue and orange weld lines were still visible. Or that Rex marks his kills with hash marks on both sides of the helmet and all over his arms and legs as well.

Obviously I needed to recreate all of this and oh boy those hash marks were a challenge. I'm not really pleased with the ones on his helmet, but by the time I got to his arms I had it down for the most part. It could still be better and if I were doing a display version I would probably be repainting them. But for a game piece, they work pretty well. They do get kind of lost with the rest of the weathering though. The hash marks on his shins, for example, are all but invisible now due to the mud on his legs.


BARC Speeder

This weekend, I was able to finally put the finishing touches on the BARC Speeder. This one took awhile to get around to, because I was having issues finding 501st color schemes.

Luckily, thanks to an old toy listing, I found a scheme I liked and went to work on it. Unfortunately it didn't have a color scheme for the side car, so I left it plain white.

For most of Legion, any weapon options seem to be given their own model. Not so on the BARC, you need to choose which weapon to use. To get around this, I decided to mangetize the gunner. His torso is magged at the waist to allow swapping between the two torsos. The gunner that fires the sidecar mounted weapons has magnets in the handles that he's holding as well as 3 magnets in each gun to mount them to his hands and the sidecar's front end. 


Dark Messiah, aka Anakin Skywalker

Since I'm painting the Republic army as 501st I really wanted to have Anakin Skywalker lead them, but he's not available yet. So my next best choice is to use Obi-Wan's rules and use an off brand model to represent Anakin.

This model comes from Skull Forge Studios, and I bought it through Shapeways. It doesn't come with a lit lightsaber and in order to have him holding one I used a leftover lightsaber from the General Grievous model. Funnily enough, the one I had available looked like a version of Anakin's lightsaber too, so it worked out really well.

His clothes are all very dark and over various types of material. His robe and clothing seem to be a type of wool, while his tunic is black leather. The variation and darkness of material proved to be a bit of a challenge getting the OSL to work properly. I'm not 100% sold on it, but it'll have to work for now, since he's just a placeholder until an official model releases. If one does come out, I'm hoping for a model without a robe and featuring his Jedi armor plating like Obi-Wan is wearing.




Beholder Diorama

Thanks to my buddy, Greg, I was able to add some more realistic rubble to the Beholder diorama's terrain. He was kind enough to send me a couple packs of bricks, which I tossed into a Ziploc bag and smashed with a hammer to create broken down pieces of stone.

I've added quite a bit to the base and it's looking really nice now. There's some spots I'd like to pile up a bit more, but I think it's very close to ready now. Soon I'll be able to primed it all and start laying down some undertones.

This project is a slow burn and I'm taking my time on it. The paint phase it going to take a long time, since there's so much going on with it. The key is to make sure the arch where the girl is hiding glows with lantern light, which will require the rest of the piece to be relatively dark in tone, but not just painted in blacks and blues.

That's it for now. There's a lot of things happening so far this year and I'll try my hardest to keep up the updates.

Until next time, you can catch me on Twitter and Instagram.

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!