Begun, another Legion project has.

Following the strong tone dip and matt varnish, I decided to dry brush the droids fairly liberally with the Vallejo Bonewhite base colour.

I wanted to leave the dip colour in the recesses but bring back the lighter bare colour.  I left it a bit tough as I don’t want my battle droids to look too pristine.

Once that was done, I went over them with a wash of Seraphim Sepia. They have a more brown look to them now which I like, I don’t want them to be too white.

While I was doing this I had a go at repainting the guns with grey seer then Black Templar contrast paint.  I’m still playing with this trying to get the right effect, so far it isn’t going down like I had in mind.  Either it looks too translucent or too much like flat black, I’ll revisit later.

The next step will probably be to do a few highlights and get the accent colour done.

Once all my B1 droids are built, I spray primed them in Vallejo Bonewhite.

Next, I needed to start experimenting.  I don’t want to spend several months laboriously shading 36 droids because I’m a slow painter and dislike painting the same thing repeatedly.

So first I tried washes and slapped Agrax Earthshade on one droid.  It didn’t bring out the details as much as I hoped so tried again with Nuln Oil.  It was slightly better but still didn’t define the model as I wanted.

So I escalated and brought out the big guns and reached for the Army Painter Strong Tone Dip.  This stuff stinks and takes 24 hours to properly dry so I took advantage of the good weather to go sit in the garden and slap it on with an old brush.

AP Dip is basically a tinted gloss varnish, it dries hard, darkens everything (strong tone, named for a reason) and leaves your minis quite shiny.  So I then went over everything with a layer of Matt varnish to take the sheen off.

Step one, assemble stuff for priming.  Pretty obvious, right?

As I have two core sets, I have two Grievouses. Grevei?  So I get to build two of the three options.  One is the four-saber whirling death machine, the other gets a pistol and cloak.  There is a lot of textured detail inside the cloak so I will paint it before assembling.

Then there was the task of building four squads of B1 Battle Droids with their tiny little TWO PART separate heads. I only dropped four of them under the dining table so that went *fine*.

Aside from the stupid heads I didn’t find them too horrific.  I am planning on clear basing the army so everything is being primed as is.

So this will be a Spring Cleaning Challenge entry as I get stuck into my Christmas pressies and start my first Star Wars Legion army!

I am going to start with the Separatists as I have always liked the look of battle droids and they have some cool villains.

I have accrued so far:

2x Clone Wars Core sets

Count Dooku

Cad Bane

Darth Maul

1x BX Commando Droids squad

1x B2 Super Battle Droids squad