2025 Painting Log

Like most Star Wars fans of a certain age, I really enjoyed Rogue One and especially the Andor streaming series. As a rule I think Star Wars has always worked better as a setting than as actual movies. So many of us grew up playing with those Kenner action figures, we spent far more time making our own adventures than we did watching the films, films that look great and are populated by intriguing characters acting out stories that are actually pretty silly once you really start to look at them closely.

The Mandalorian reads to me like two kids playing in the sandbox with their Star Wars toys. To belabor the metaphor, The Book of Boba Fett reads like what happens when those two kids are forced to let their younger sibling play too (Boba Fett riding a rancor?).

The Andor series is often called “Star Wars for adults,” and it is. It tells a sophisticated story with a lot of adult themes (occasionally a little too adult, in my opinion). But it should be viewed as the exception rather than the rule.

As adults, we want new Star Wars material to make us feel the way it did when we were children, but of course it can’t do that, because (probably) we’ve somehow forgotten that it wasn’t just what was on screen, it was what was in our imagination when we played with those toys. For most of us it explains our enduring interest in tiny fighting men, especially those of the Star Wars variety.

Whew, that was a bit of a ramble.

Anyway, here’s Cassian Andor with his trusty robot pal and a couple of nameless troopers. I’ve been mixing up different painting techniques a lot lately — these were all done in a combination of basecoat –> wash –> drybrush highlights (we need to come up with a stupid name for that), Foundry-style triad, and speedpaints, which I frequently find myself using as a highly pigmented wash.

I’ve also changed up my varnish game a little bit. I did these first with a coat of AK Interactive matte, which is a little on the satin (semi-gloss) side. Once that had dried I followed up with a layer of AK Interactive Ultra Matte mixed 2 to 1 with Speedpaint medium. So far I’m finding that this gives me a nice flat finish without being quite as chalky as the Ultra Matte straight out of the bottle.

2025 models painted so far: 150, for 11 different games