I find your lack of faith disturbing

I never thought I’d hate painting black and white as much as when I threw myself into painting my first two squads of stormtroopers.

It was not long after our sets had arrived in March and I’d gone out and bought dad and I some paint to cut our teeth into. I had just finished Palpatine and his Royal Guard, and they looked fantastic. Well to me they did at least! So I excitedly to put brush to plastic again and was confident I could replicate my handiwork.

Inexperienced, excited and confident in my abilities (or lack there of) after reading and viewing many a painting guide, I took my brush to the first trooper. And 20 minutes later I wanted to throw the miniature in the bin. How could it be that hard!?!

But I persevered. What a mistake.

My paint wasn’t thinned enough, my hands too shaky, using the wrong sized brush and not taking my time, all contributed to the mess that was staring back at me. 

So I gave up.

I waited until the conditions were right, and then primed the whole lot black. Then I dry brushed them an off white, then a pure white and called it quits. They actually didn’t look too bad, very weathered which suited the endor theme I was going for. Was I happy with them? No. But they were a start.

For the next squad, I tried another technique. This time I thinned my blacks perfectly and carefully picked my way through the black under armour. With that successfully completed I moved on to the armour. I pulled out my shade/wash and went to town, slathering all over the minis. What I failed to do here was stop the excess pooling on the surfaces and I ended up with what is coined as “coffee staining”. #&@$!! 

A light coat of off white helped erase my heavy-handedness but I had lost a lot of the detail that the washes were supposed to give off. This squad now went into the “I’ll come back to you later” pile and I moved on, not revisiting my stormtroopers until I had a technique I approved of and could affect adequately.

What I did do was move on to my Death Troopers. But these death troopers were going to be a bit different; I wanted Sith Troopers.

Red, oh how I love red. Red was so much more forgiving than white but so were these models. Don’t get me wrong, I still had a hell of a time painting these! My OCD and perfectionism took over and as a result I was so slow in getting these done (close to 4 hours each trooper). But these were a labour of love and I found as the more I went on, the more my technique and hands improved. And I got slightly quicker. 

With many weeks and layers of paint spent on them, I finally had a trooper squad fully completed to my satisfaction. Whilst not perfect, it was a squad that I could be proud of, considering I’d only just started my painting journey!