Wookies, Shoretroopers, and a Building, Oh My!

Back with some more Star Wars Legion items. First up are a squad of Wookie warriors. 

Sadly, the box only contains four figures, but they are a fair amount larger that the standard Legion figures. I've opted to go with various shades of brown on the fur to give them more variety. These colors are based on images of the Wookies seen in the prequel movies.

Next up is a Shoretrooper squad, as seen in Rogue One. These took a bit more effort to paint compared to the regular Stormtroopers, but I (and more importantly, my son) are happy with the final results. 

As with the Stormtroopers, I've done my best to give them a dirty, battle-hardened look.

Lastly, I assembled my first Star Wars themed building.  This is a Tatooine style house from TTCombat's Sandstorm line. It's not as detailed, and doesn't have the lift-off roofs that you can get with Knight's of Dice Sandport Hydra line, but the price and shipping to the US are much more reasonable.

Directions are not included, but can be downloaded off the TTcombat site. Other reviewers have recommend fully assembling the domes before gluing the roof down, and I would have to agree. I slid in the support beams without glue and then fit the card dome in place before tacking everything down on the inside with superglue. I also recommend scoring the card fold lines with a blade before folding to ensure proper bending.

The windows don't come with any covering, so I used some old overhead project film with some grid lines printed on it. I also made some card frames for the windows to make them more pronounces once I had textured the building. 

The door and greebles that come with the kit have patterns burned into them, but are still flat.  I thought this looked rather dull, so I scanned them into the computer and glued the printout onto some card so I could build up layers.

Here's the building with all the greebles and card attached. I have  replaced some of the MDF pipes with plastic strips. The hard edges of the building have also been sanded down. 

To texture the building, I used Liquitex ceramic stucco gel. The finished application was a bit rougher than I wanted, so I sanded it down prior to painting.

I wanted the building to look good on a variety of mats, so was looking for the best universal color to use.  In reviewing pictures from the various Tatooine locations, I noticed many buildings were darker on the bottom than the top, and that gave me the idea to have a color shift from a reddish base to a yellowish top. Overall, I think it looks pretty good on different backgrounds.

If you'd like to reproduce the same effect, I used FolkArt craft paint colors Raw Sienna, Honeycomb, Camel, and White. Additionally, I used some Secret Weapon Dark Sepia wash to add some grime around the base and greebles.

My only disappointment with my work is that some of the seam lines of the dome are still visible after texturing and painting. For the next building, I think I'll try a second coat of stucco gel on the dome to see if it helps. 

The building is actually a decent size, and the doors are tall enough to look good with the over-sized Legion figures.

My youngest wants to try our first game this weekend, so hopefully everything will live up to his expectations.  Fingers crossed!

Star Wars Legion

With the release of the new Star Wars movie, my sons' enthusiasm for the series has returned.  I have been trying to get them back into wargaming (they lost interest in superhero battles, and historicals hasn't been a draw), so I thought Star Wars Legion might be the bait to do it. As such, I decided to take the plunge and ordered the core box along with a few add on units that interested the kids. There is still a lot of painting to do, but I've rushed out two core units and the commanders so we can try out a first game.
  

First up is a squad of stormtroopers. We decided our preference was for planetary battles rather than ship to ship actions, so we've gone with a battle ragged look rather than pristine white armor.  

For the rebel troops, we used the Rogue One color schemes as inspiration, as we felt it fit a variety of terrain types.  When it comes time to paint the second unit, we'll likely use more greens to make them stand out from each other.

The most challenging elements for me to paint were the lightsabers for Darth Vader and Luke. I want it to feel like they are glowing, but on my first attempt the blades looked too light and washed out. As such, I decided to repaint them darker and instead try to add appropriate highlights to each figure to give the impression of reflected light.  I've never tried this technique before and I'm not sure I effectively pulled it off, but at this stage I'm just going to go with it.

We wanted the bases to look good with a variety of game mats, so decided to use a neutral brown rock from Woodland Scenics and some Gamers Grass yellow-green toned tufts picked up at the local shop. This was my first time using Gamers Grass (previously I've used Army Painter and War World) and I have to say I wasn't as impressed with the quality when compared to the other companies' products. There seemed to be a lot of loose grass on each tuft and some of the grass strands were glued in at odd angles and didn't give the impression of growing out of the ground (all three varieties). As such, I've had to spend a lot of time trying to pull and cut those stray strands out of the tufts to make them look better. I'll continue to use them on the rest of the figures for constancy, but doubt I'll purchase them again.

All said and done, I'm happy overall with how everything came together. We hope to have our first test game with the simple rules soon, so fingers crossed I've done my job as a wargaming dad and will lure them back to the dark side.