Pafetikbazerka’s bad kitty and other Imperial nasties

One thing that I always picture when I think of Imperial Officers is that line created by the double breasted tunic running down the right side so I took a sharp wood carving knife and carefully scraped in little step to accentuate where the tunic comes across.

I’ll probably adjust the ranking bars on the left breast as well to give a little more presonality. 1 of them will be a higher ranking officer in grey with red and blue bars , the other 2 officers will be in black with a single blue bar.

So I added some shading with blue wash then a few more passes with a ceramic white glaze and I’m ok with the look from a gaming distance but I think I over did the matt base in my glaze and probably didn’t thin my layers quite enough. The finish looks a little rough when say, zoomed in for photos etc.

Maybe a gloss base for my glazes would have been easier in long run, but I figure I can still gloss them and decide from there. Another clear coat or two will only protect them from here.

As for the squad colour I decide to give them coloured cogs on their shoulders which is enough to identify if I lose track but doesn’t detract from the uniformity that is the Stormtrooper en-masse.

So I’m looking at stromtrooper reference material and seeing 2 stand out issues.

1. Stomtroopers are clean and shiny which I’m thinking is ok if it was just 1 or 2 minis coz I can spend some real time blending shading and actually making them look interesting but I have a few to paint and nee to get through them quickly.
2. It seems more or less standard to indicate some sort of squad colour either via bases or as coloured shoulders or banding but I’ve already ordered clear bases and feel the other options detract from how a ‘typical’ storm trooper should appear

So I decide I need a balance between clean with a little definition and throw down a black wash first to bring up the detail then go in with a off-white ‘almost’ dry brush. This is where many of the the mouldings imperfections started appearing. But not really having the time I just dealt with them as I went along.

At some point I felt I had overdone the dry brushing so gave them a quick spray of gloss followed by a dilute wash before I started glazing on ceramic white

So a bit of back and forth with gentle dry-brushing and dilute washes of strong tone, picked out some details, and I think they are  just about done. The bases I will leave till I have decided what I want to do. Imperial Assault strikes me as being one of those games that really benefits on the board with clear bases and I noticed a few listings about.

So I got myself a new Badger Krome airbrush to complement my old Badger Cresendo. It came with a fine and ultra fine needle so I just had to see how much detail I could start squeezing out of it. Its a big leap forward from the crescendo but using it to paint stripes was a probably bit ambitious so I knocked the stripes back to use a more traditional method.

Brushing the stripes certainly gave more control but they still felt too sharp , I was kind of fumbling my way through fur creation here so I knocked the painted stripes back again by about 50% then started gently dry brushing them in. The upside of this back and forth is it started giving me a hint of the fur effect I was after. Below you can see the dry brushed mini vs the 50% knocked back

So to date my painting efforts have included scaly dragons, a few armour encased warriors, human heroes, and decaying zombies. This being my first furry kitty I sought a little reference and some inspiration.