Sorastro's Painting

By Sorastro, in Imperial Assault Painting and Modification

Anytime. Keep up the awesome pew pews. :)

Starting my first painting job very soon! Thank you for this!

Hi folks!

The epic series continues with Grand Admiral Thrawn - please enjoy! :)

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Hello!

I'm a little late posting this here as I was away visiting family over Christmas when the video launched, but I hope you enjoy(ed) my take on Sabine Wren .

Also I'd like to thank all of my dear viewers for the kind words of encouragement that have played such a big part in helping motivate me to reach this 50th episode!

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Edited by Sorastro

As always Sorastro...Master Class piece!

I had a go at Gamorrean Guards, using one of Sorastro's patreon backer PDF guides.

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These guys took a really long time to paint. I found working on 4 at a time a bit tiring, but I am quite pleased with the results.

You can't really tell, but they have slimy snouts, from a bit of Nurgle's Rot :)

Hi folks!

I've make a quick Shyla Varad video if anyone's interested :)

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The Emperor. I didn't go for the steel wool lightning effect because a) no airbrush and b) hopefully we'll use this guy in a campaign soon, and it looks a bit awkward :D

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Emperor Palpatine

Sorry for the poor quality pic - I used my phone, rather than dig out my SLR.

My wife is working this holiday weekend, so I have more time to get my brushes out :)

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BT-1 and 0-0-0

Speed painted yesterday morning in about 3 hours. Quite pleased with the lighting effect from BeeTee's eye/lens. Wondering if I should push the highlights further on Triple Zero?

This time it's the AT-DP. Rather than repeat the AT-ST or Weiss looks, I wanted it to look a bit more like the CG look of the Rebels TV show and the flatter grey they use.

AT-DP

Great idea with the plate color changing to add variety. Will definitely keep that in mind, if I get around to paint it. So far my luck with the AT-ST has been horrible, so I've shied away from it.

On 4/27/2019 at 5:41 PM, aermet69 said:

Great idea with the plate color changing to add variety. Will definitely keep that in mind, if I get around to paint it. So far my luck with the AT-ST has been horrible, so I've shied away from it.

Sorastro, I must say, your videos are quite awesome. I recently got imperial assault even though the hype has pretty much vanished.

I got it mainly because your videos made want to paint again, as I did when I was a child, however you videos has also made me become a better painter.

Thank you so much for your videos. The game is awesome in itself but painting is a really nice way to just relax, and focus on something, really helps with managing stress.

I have only painted some stormtroopers and a probe droid so far, but hope to move on to imperial guards, Boba Fett, Luke, Vader, emperor and a lot of other figures.

Just wanted to express my gratitude.

On 11/15/2019 at 9:40 AM, Doc.Juego said:

Sorastro, I must say, your videos are quite awesome. I recently got imperial assault even though the hype has pretty much vanished.

I got it mainly because your videos made want to paint again, as I did when I was a child, however you videos has also made me become a better painter.

Thank you so much for your videos. The game is awesome in itself but painting is a really nice way to just relax, and focus on something, really helps with managing stress.

I have only painted some stormtroopers and a probe droid so far, but hope to move on to imperial guards, Boba Fett, Luke, Vader, emperor and a lot of other figures.

Just wanted to express my gratitude.

Thank you so much! I really appreciate that. Whilst you're working through the figures, I might suggest also watching some of the Star Wars: Legion painting videos because I change my approach a bit with some of the characters/units, and you might find some of the alternative ideas quite useful (my Legion Vader is a lot better than my IA Vader for example!) :)

Hey @Sorastro ! I got some paints for Christmas and finally starting to paint my miniatures. I'll probably have a ton of questions along the way. First one! After priming my Stormtroopers with white, there are a few grey spots still should I try primer one more time or should I just paint them with white. (As a follow-up to that is the White Scar layer ok or should I use the Base white?)

When I look at some of your other videos I notice that the glazes have been discontinued by Citadel. Do you have any suggestions as a replacement?

I'll try and post pictures of my progress.

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I recently picked up painting over the summer, and your videos were a huge help. This was everything I finished up through about September or so (aside from the Trandoshans and Bossk, who I finished more recently before taking this pic). Although I didn't do anything special with the bases, because that was just another cost I didn't want to add on to the paints I'd already bought. So I opted for leaving the imperials grey, rebels red, and mercenaries green, and I did the rims of the heroes in blue to differentiate them.

I’m going to use Sorastro’s vids to teach my children to paint. Pretty sure anyone can manage a decent stormtrooper!

On 1/10/2020 at 11:10 PM, Loosie said:

Hey @Sorastro ! I got some paints for Christmas and finally starting to paint my miniatures. I'll probably have a ton of questions along the way. First one! After priming my Stormtroopers with white, there are a few grey spots still should I try primer one more time or should I just paint them with white. (As a follow-up to that is the White Scar layer ok or should I use the Base white?)

When I look at some of your other videos I notice that the glazes have been discontinued by Citadel. Do you have any suggestions as a replacement?

I'll try and post pictures of my progress.

Hi Loosie! I think if you've got any small gaps in your priming, then just brush on some of your base white to cover them up (to avoid the risk of over spraying the mini). I'm honestly not a big fan of the Citadel whites to be honest; these days I use a heavy-body artists acrylic (by Schmincke, but there are others of course). For glazing you can actually use pretty much any paint you like - just pick something vibrant, and thin it down ideally with some medium (Lahmian Medium, or Vallejo's Glaze Medium for example). :)

On 1/11/2020 at 5:27 PM, Annette Soleil said:

I recently picked up painting over the summer, and your videos were a huge help. This was everything I finished up through about September or so (aside from the Trandoshans and Bossk, who I finished more recently before taking this pic). Although I didn't do anything special with the bases, because that was just another cost I didn't want to add on to the paints I'd already bought. So I opted for leaving the imperials grey, rebels red, and mercenaries green, and I did the rims of the heroes in blue to differentiate them.

Fabulous work Annette! Thanks so much for sharing :)

On 1/11/2020 at 10:07 PM, Estarriol said:

I’m going to use Sorastro’s vids to teach my children to paint. Pretty sure anyone can manage a decent stormtrooper!

Fantastic! Don't underestimate the Stromtroopers however... :D

Thought I give these a share since I was posting them to a discord.

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I really like how they feel part of the same squad in the coloring. Well done.

My stormtroopers are done!

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I used one of Sorastro's PDF guides to get started on this guy, but quickly wandered off track - still looks ok though I think

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I don't think I ever want to look at another Stormtrooper again in my life (and I still have the Snowtroopers, ugh).

The recent Clonetrooper video was a huge help, although they did come out slightly darker than the first batch of nine Stormtroopers from the core game (you can tell comparing the three new standard troopers against the original nine I painted in the middle). You can definitely tell that the newer miniatures are of much higher quality and it was never more obvious to me than when I was painting them side by side like this. The older minis seem to have a slightly rougher texture to them that catches more of the contrasts/shades. And when batch painting 20(!) of these guys at once, I knew I wouldn't have the patience to painstakingly highlight all of them back up. At least with the Heavy Troopers (which also have that rougher texture) the red patterns I put on them covered up a lot of the messier spots.

I wanted to differentiate the varieties of Stormtroopers a bit more to make them a little more visually interesting. So I opted for red patterns with the Heavy troopers, blue for the Jet troopers, and dark grey for the Riot troopers. I also painted the shields and jetpacks with a slightly darker mix of the contrast colors I used on the armor (and I did the jetpacks in two coats to make them even darker), and most of the guns and backpacks for the heavy troopers with pure Black Templar which worked so nicely I didn't even need to do much highlighting with them. I might use it for all of the guns going forward (or experiment using a silver dry brush followed by the contrast paint, to see if it'll produce a slightly more metallic look). The contrast mix ended up pooling in a few weird spots on the shields but I actually like how they turned out because it easily passes as effortless battle damage.

Considering I'm already most of the way through all of the Imperial figures anyway, I might just wrap up the remaining ones before moving on to the rest of the rebels or mercenaries. They're a lot easier anyway because most of them are so monotone that they don't take as long to finish. The dewbacks and maybe the Inquisitor or Thrawn will probably be the only somewhat challenging ones left out of the Imperials.

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It's been a little over a year since I painted my first minis. The IA Stormtroopers were the first ones I painted in early July of 2019 and I proceeded to wrap up the majority of the core set minis by the end of that summer. So since it's been a little over a year since I started, and Sorastro's videos were a major inspiration that helped get me started, I wanted to post a sort of progress report on everything I've done over the last year. Right now, this is the full collection of everything I've finished painting. A grand total of 132 minis (plus one movement tray) painted over the course of a year. I've kept myself busy.

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Obviously, there are my IA minis. While it wasn't the first board game I owned with miniatures (Mansions of Madness was the first), it was the one that convinced me to give painting them a try. And obviously Sorastro's videos were my main inspiration. But I did take some initiative and take some creative liberties of my own, like doing each of the officers in a different color, various color patterns for Stormtrooper varieties, and a desert camo pattern for some of the trandoshans. And more recently I wrapped up all of the hero minis, because I finally felt confident enough to do the ones Sorastro hasn't covered on my own. Though regrettably I did rush some of them because I wound up batch painting about half of them all at once. I might go back and do some additional highlighting at some point.

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I got Journeys in Middle Earth for Christmas last year and managed to actually finish painting the entire game! It felt great to have a complete painted set, and I'm looking forward to working on the Shadowed Paths expansion so that I once against have a finished collection. Especially that Balrog, which looks very nice. Looking forward to seeing those new video and PDF guides.

I'm actually very happy with all of these ones overall, and it definitely shows how much more practice I've had by the time I got around to them. Elena wound up looking kind of cross-eyed, Beravor's cloak could've been highlighted a little better, and for some reason there's a few chips (or spots I somehow missed) in the paint on a few of em I need to go back and touch up at some point. There's a white spot on Aragorn's cloak, Elena's hair, and the troll's stomach. I'm not sure how those happened, since I did spray them with varnish, but oh well. These are all just nitpicks though.

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Mansions of Madness was the first game with minis I ever owned, and naturally I intended to go back and start painting it once I was confident enough in my own skills to give it a try without Sorastro's guides (although that Deep One PDF will be a nice reference). I'm a huge fan of anything Lovecraftian in general, and I own just about all of the games in the Arkham Horror line (I never grabbed Final Hour or the original Call of Cthulhu LCG, and I don't own the Elder Sign expansions, but I've got literally everything else). Some of the 1st Edition minis are really wonky looking, but a good paint job definitely helps fix them up. And I never would've had the confidence to paint them on my own without the guidance I had with my earlier painted minis.

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And then lastly, I picked up the Song of Ice and Fire Miniatures Game last month, which makes four games I now need to work through. I just finished these up yesterday, because I wanted to finally give basing effects a try (I used Sorastro's Star Wars Legion videos as reference for that). Overall I'm really happy with how it turned out. Some grass tufts might've been nice, but that would definitely get expensive over time considering how many minis are in this game (over 100 in just the core set!) and I wanted to keep my terrain consistent across each faction. Maybe if I pick up the Targaryens later on, I'll try out some of those for variety.

I've still got a long way to go just working through the games I already own. I've done 132 minis this past year, but I own a grand total of 519 between the four various games I own. And that number's only going to go up if I pick up additional expansions for ASoIaF. And I've got my eye on CMON's Bloodborne Board Game as well, if I can manage to buy someone's all-in pledge (I unfortunately missed out on their Kickstarter campaign, and it has a LOT of exclusive content), which'll add over 200 more minis for me to paint. Maybe more if they decide to do an Old Hunter's expansion in the future (god I hope so, I want a Lady Maria mini).

Thank you Sorastro for all of your outstanding tutorials. I'm very much looking forward to your take on all the new minis from Shadowed Paths, as well as any other future projects you may have planned. Maybe once I finally find a job amidst the pandemic apocalypse (assuming the US doesn't burn itself to the ground by November), I can finally upgrade myself to Lord status on your Patreon. :P

Edited by Annette Soleil

I think I've taken around five years to paint about half this number of figures :P

Edited by udat