A few months ago (before we had a repaint subforum—woo!) I started a thread showing off my very first repaints (link), and what I learned in the process. I'd hoped documenting my efforts would prove entertaining to a few members, and perhaps useful to some fellow newbies. I was sidelined by personal matters, but I'm excited to pick up where I left off.

Last October I did my first sixteen repaints in the space of about a month. I didn't get them all posted, so here goes:

Having had some success with a Royal Guard TIE Defender, I thought a Lambda Shuttle would be interesting in the same livery. Initially I added very little extra panel detail, but after a few days I opted for more. One of my favorite touches is the wing gears, which I left white. I painted white over some of the excess wash to make them pop. I think the model's overall look is pretty good, but the execution was imperfect—this was my first large-base repaint.

I found the large-base model to be a surprisingly different experience than the small-base models. The small models require fine work on a very small area. The same fine work and small details are required on the large models, but they also have larger details that require different techniques. With several times the surface area of a small ship, I found it a lot more challenging and time-consuming—but I'm still a beginner, and making mistakes. The experience has given me a lot more confidence about my next large model.

The most important lesson I learned on this job: I should have used a dark base coat. The white shuttle looked pink even after 2-3 coats of red, and I think I ended up having to do six coats. That led to some sloppiness toward the end, and I got too lazy to keep thinning the paint, so the brush strokes show.

I also think the wash on this particular model isn't quite right. I think it has a decent weathered look, but I think a Royal Guard vessel would be brighter and in better repair. Yet some of the recesses are insufficiently defined. Finding the right balance on everything was really experimental at this stage. But it's fun!

Royal Guard repaints tend to be pretty forgiving; Imperial ships look good in red. I think this pattern could be one of my favorites. At some point I'll definitely try a revised and improved version.

To continue the theme I painted a Royal Guard TIE Fighter:

This is an easy way to practice fine work since you're dealing primarily with a single color. Getting every panel strut right without spilling over takes time. I always try to take a slow, relaxed approach. I put on a TV show or music and just enjoy the process. Rushing is your enemy and can undo your work in a moment.

This was also an experiment with a different shade of red from my previous Royal Guard vessels. It closely matches the stock Royal Guard Interceptors from Imperial Aces, but I think I favor the slightly duller tone on the Defender (old thread).

I modeled the white details on the stock RG Interceptor. The macro photo reveals some shakiness but it looks better IRL.

Unlike my previous TIEs I went with green laser cannons. I think I like the green more than the red for TIEs. Note also the bright red ion engines.

My final backlogged repaints are a revised Blue Squadron B-Wing, a cloaking effect TIE Phantom, a Shadow Squadron Phantom, and Kaa'to Leeachos' Z-95. I'll be posting those over the next few days, while I get to work on my first repaints of 2015. I'd be grateful for your feedback and suggestions, and I'm always happy to answer questions via this thread or PM. Happy painting!

As you've discovered, large, flat surfaces like on the shuttle require some extra care to get a good result. It mostly comes down to how paint flows from a brush. On a small area, the brush leaves a fairly smooth trail of paint but on larger surfaces, the paint can spread more and becomes slighty uneven. I prefer flat brushes for this kind of work but the only surefire way to get it right is by painstakingly painting several thin layers.

Nice repaints.

I really appreciate your comments in relation to the models too.

Whilst I have never tried it myself, I hear a lot of people have success with spray guns when tackling those large flat surfaces.

As you've discovered, large, flat surfaces like on the shuttle require some extra care to get a good result. It mostly comes down to how paint flows from a brush. On a small area, the brush leaves a fairly smooth trail of paint but on larger surfaces, the paint can spread more and becomes slighty uneven. I prefer flat brushes for this kind of work but the only surefire way to get it right is by painstakingly painting several thin layers.

Yes, this was something I definitely read before I tried it out, and it can't be stressed enough. I think if I'd primered I could have used fewer coats and the results would have been better. It's critical that you concentraaate—(thunk)!

Nice repaints.

I really appreciate your comments in relation to the models too.

Whilst I have never tried it myself, I hear a lot of people have success with spray guns when tackling those large flat surfaces.

Thanks! I'm really interested in getting an airbrush—ideal priming, incredibly thin coats, great fade effects for engines—I really enjoy brushwork but this is a tool I want in my arsenal. I've seen a lot of great pieces on these forums but I was particularly inspired by Rob Jedi's GR75 engines, which many of you will have seen. In the meantime for this batch I'll have to settle for primering at least one with a can of spray paint.

Here's my first experiment with a cloaking effect:

This one I owe to Jay Adan (YouTube tutorial). I pretty much followed his instructions. I approached this repaint with some trepidation but it was easier than it looked, and I thought the results were acceptable for my skill level.

Creating a natural-looking "electrical" pattern, with neither too much nor too little, is the biggest artistic challenge here. The fine work of overlaying three successively thinner blue lines over the entire pattern is the biggest technical challenge. You'll need a set of fine brushes, which you probably have if you're a miniature painter. I believe I used a #2, #1, and #0. I'm going to do a decloaking version this round and see if I can't improve on it.

This was my second shot at the Blue Squadron B-Wing. I really liked the direction the first one was going (original thread), but the blue was brighter than I envisioned, and the blue wash was splotchier than I liked. So I thinned the blue wash a little less this time, but applied it more thinly. It came out much more closely to what I'd envisioned.

I used an orange/red combo for the engine glow and I really like it for the B-Wing.

I want to try a third version down the road, and paint a pair of them. I fly Blue Squadron a fair amount and this model draws more attention on the table than any of my other repaints for some reason.

Give yourself some credit, that phantom is WAY better than "acceptable."

Give yourself some credit, that phantom is WAY better than "acceptable."

Thanks! I'm a perfectionist and a total newb, so compared to some of the work I've seen on here I feel a little self-conscious about mine!

No need to be self-conscious friend. That cloaking is AWESOME!!!!

Wow, thanks for the props on the Phantom. I was joking a little bit about the self-consciousness. This community has always been supportive of painters of all skill levels. That vibe inspired me to try miniature painting, and to add my contribution to this forum. I am definitely a perfectionist though!

This forum is an excellent resource and everyone who's shared their work and their perspectives deserves props for contributing. You guys bring some incredible things to the table. Thanks for being awesome.

Staying with the Phantom, I really liked the art for Shadow Squadron, and tried that on for size. It might see more time on the table now with the rules change.

I tried a relatively lazy approach here and used a few washes of Nuln Oil to darken up the model. I think it works, but it meant doing the cockpit windows last. I think a better approach would be to do the windows first, and to paint the hull last. That would achieve more sharply defined windows and better hull color.

I started with a base of cyan on the windshield, then while it was still tacky, a light coat of a mauve color (mixed magenta and white). I was a little bit organic with the mauve coat, allowing the cyan to mix or show through in places, and finished up with a few white highlights. The subtle variance gives it more depth and realism. The choice of cyan was to pick up the color of the hull, simulating some reflection, as in the painting.

[Protip: take notes when you paint. I would have no idea what I did or how to match the color in the future if I hadn't written it down. Document your work; learn from your successes as well as your failures. Then put them on this forum!]

Painting variants that match card art is my main goal right now, nothwithstanding the superfluous Royal Guards. I don't tend to favor flamboyant styles, especially for Imperials, but I think the Shadow Squadron paint job really gets to stand out from the pack while retaining the Imperial flavor.

Next I painted Kaa'to, the same day the card was spoiled. Everyone was painting N'dru Suhlak but I wasn't ready to tackle the freehand shark face, and thought "Yellow, eh? That's for me!" I went to some pains to match the color, and followed the card art as closely as possible.

What it lacks in creativity it makes up in easiness! Seriously though, while I like the overall look, the engines got away from me. I think more white, more fading, and less spillover. The yellow was too thick—I was trying to take a shortcut. Learn from my mistakes and the sage advice of every other painter on this forum and use multiple thin coats.

That's the last of the backlog. I'll be painting something new soon, and I for one will be interested to see what it is, because I haven't decided.

Give yourself some credit, that phantom is WAY better than "acceptable."

Thanks! I'm a perfectionist and a total newb, so compared to some of the work I've seen on here I feel a little self-conscious about mine!

The phantom looks great. Being a perfectionist and a total newb myself, you give me hope that I might be able to produce painted miniatures like this some day.

I love that Black phantom with the red pit.

I'm severely tempted to add that to my list of todo's

I just did my first repaint since October—a Green Squadron A-Wing based on the card art. I've been wanting to try this one out for a while. I've seen a lot of takes on Green Squadron, but I don't think I've seen one that looks like the card. The first challenge was to figure out the colors. It has a dark olive hull, and a gold canopy, but the center stripe isn't obvious. It looks like a dark purple but almost a little bronze. I decided to go for the dark purple.

Of all the photos I've taken, this model ended up having the most difference between its appearance in the macro shot, versus how it looks in person. IRL the colors look too dark, to the point that the purple looks black. Based on the photo I'd say it needs to be darker, but when I finished painting it, it definitely seemed like it needed to be lighter. Conundrum.

I didn't have a gold color for the canopy so I tried a rust wash over yellow. Not what I'd hoped for, but it'll be easy to touch up when I pick up a better paint for the job.

This was my first attempt at drybrushing. What was barely visible to the eye shows up with a lot of contrast here (mostly the foremost part of the purple stripe). The fin (wing?) edges are white in the picture, so I painted those. The paint was a little thin and ran into some of the detail work, which actually ended up looking great IRL. I'm not sure exactly how I'd do it differently next time, except to alter the colors a little and thin the white less.

I should have gotten less angle on this shot to show the engines better. Started with orange, with yellow in the middle, and a white hotspot. They came out pretty well. I kind of ignored the inside of the rings, figuring whatever was accidentally applied in the process might have a natural look. Next time I'd give them specific attention to make them look like they're catching the backwash.

I felt pretty comfortable with the brush even after several months, but I'm a little rusty overall. I tried a few new things on this one, too. So I'm happy with the results, considering, but I'll definitely try it again some time. I've got my notes and reference photos, and I think this can be a cool design that matches the card once I get the bugs out. Would welcome any advice or comments!

Do you mean this one?



The stripe is red. It's actually just the default red A-wing in shadow. It's the A-wing from Endor, which is where Green Squadron is from: the default colour scheme is theirs. Arvel is Green Leader.

This is the scene shown on the card:



EDIT: Saturated up the image to try and illustrate the red and funnily enough the hull did turn green. I guess that explains why you'd see it in green if you didn't see the shadow effect. Must have been how the artist did the darkened off white (off grey?).

Do you mean this one?

The stripe is red. It's actually just the default red A-wing in shadow. It's the A-wing from Endor, which is where Green Squadron is from: the default colour scheme is theirs. Arvel is Green Leader.

::spit take:: TIE Pilot, you've turned my world upside down. Green is red, black is white. . .dragons and pengiuns are gonna look weird. . .

This seriously made my day. Thanks for taking the time to put together an awesome post and setting me straight. Wookiepedia confirms that all the named pilots served in Green Squadron. I guess green isn't a standard option at Incom. Or maybe green is for credits, 'cause these things are like the Porsches of starfighters. Next time I'll go for a custom Tycho with the one extra red panel and blast damage, and he'll park it in the hangar and tell the valet to bring around "the green one."

Heh, learning is fun.

This has got to be the blue dress/white dress of the Star Wars universe. Though, I always saw the stripe as red.

wow. wow wow.

Finally did the Moldy Crow. This was a fun one, starting with a thin gray coat over the brown areas, then mottling additional coats to give the ship a stressed, somewhat more metallic look. I finished with some light drybrushing in white and some strategically placed gray wash.

Blue ion cannons and blue engine glow bring the model to life. The thin profile of these engines made them really easy to get the white hotspots right. A careful look at the nacelles will show some minor blast damage—my first attempt at this effect. I think it came out looking pretty good.

I never disliked the much-maligned brown HWK, but now I'm starting to change my mind.

Do you mean this one?

This has got to be the blue dress/white dress of the Star Wars universe. Though, I always saw the stripe as red.

Holy flying cows batman! I always saw the A wing as a White Hull with a Red Stripe, and I've always thought that this was because the scene was shot with a green screen, so they couldn't actually be Green, so they just kinda colored them red. This theory went along with how in the novelization of A New Hope, Luke was actually Blue 5 of Blue squadron, and the Y wings were actually Red Squadron, but it was changed for filming because they used a blue screen.

But now. My. Mind. Is. Blown. My Green A wing is all wrong now. Completely. Wow. I don't even. KNOW what to do with myself anymore. I think I need to buy another A wing so I can paint that one in this scheme, and leave my other one alone in the "original" green A wing scheme.

Before you paint the white of an A-wing green it's an artifact of how the dark white was achieved. It's not actually a red and green santA-wing.

Your work is amazing - glad you updated the thread and I got to see your past projects! I especially like your Blue Squadron

I didn't have a gold color for the canopy so I tried a rust wash over yellow. Not what I'd hoped for, but it'll be easy to touch up when I pick up a better paint for the job.

Your work is amazing - glad you updated the thread and I got to see your past projects! I especially like your Blue Squadron

I didn't have a gold color for the canopy so I tried a rust wash over yellow. Not what I'd hoped for, but it'll be easy to touch up when I pick up a better paint for the job.

Obviously, it's your prerogative, but I like how the canopy turned out; it looks like it's reflecting the glow of the lights inside the cockpit.

Thanks, WarriorPoet, I appreciate it. It's really cool that you thought of the A-Wing canopy as a lighting effect—I looked at it the same way (even though it actually wasn't what I intended). I'm glad I tried it that way and I might try improving on the technique with another ship sometime.

For other novice painters: as you experiment with new techniques you may not achieve the result you wanted, but you can usually learn something useful.

My latest repaint is based on the Airen Kracken / Lieutenant Blount cards. Wookiepedia tells me they're Tala Leader and Tala Two respectively, and this paint job works for either one.

I wanted to continue to refine my drybrushing for creating wear effects. I went a little too far with the center stripe and had to fill it in again. It's a really fine line between no paint and too much.

A bit obvious maybe, but for any engines with a cavity that you want to fill, thin your paints less, if at all.

In progress is my obligatory First Order TIE Fighter. Couldn't believe how quickly they popped up after the trailer! I'm considering an M3-A and/or a StarViper after that.

Like so many others here the new Episode VII trailer got me pretty amped, and I had to do a First Order TIE Fighter:

A TIE Fighter has six spars on each side of its solar panels. That's a total of 24 spars, each with two edges, so that's 48 borders. There are also six edges around the panels, so another 24 borders, for a total of 72.

TIE Fighters look simple but it's really time consuming to paint all those borders neatly. I've gotten to the point where I can knock out Royal Guard TIEs to a high standard in a reasonable time, so I was pretty hopeful going into this, but I also knew that you can't get more contrast than black on white, so every imperfection would show. I wasn't sure how happy I'd be with the results.

I think the model stands up in the macro shots, and in real life the detail is a lot less visible and looks really clean, so I'm really happy with the results. This kind of job is great practice for fine brush control.

I painted the panels first, three really light coats. I painted in the direction of the ridges as much as possible to achieve an even look, without splotchiness or brush strokes. Then I went over all the spars with a very dark gray. That took two passes; several hours across two nights.

The white is just barely translucent enough to allow a hint of the underlying gray to show through. Depending on how the panels catch the light they can present an almost silvery appearance. I think the off-white and off-black colors give the model more depth and subtlety than pure black and white.

I've seen that others have painted the panels second, but either way you have to do all those borders really carefully. I figured black over white made the most sense. The white did have a tendency to want to collect in the edges a bit due to surface tension, and painting the black second helped to correct any uneven appearance. Just a few thoughts for anyone else planning to do this repaint.

Wanted to do some fun shots the other day:

I painted my first huge ship, the GR-75. I thought it would be fun and relatively simple to paint red hull markings in place of some of the factory gray.

I wanted to paint over some, but not all, of the gray stripes. I also wanted to add some new markings in each color. So the first step was to match the existing gray, and paint all the new stripes gray. This gave me a consistent base color for all the red markings.

It was a pretty straightforward task and I'm happy with the results. One thing I'd do differently would be to make the main engine's hot spot smaller. I find larger engines difficult to get right with freehand brush work. I've seen incredible GR-75 engine glow done with an airbrush (see Rob Jedi's post).

This was a super fun job because the GR-75 feels so organic. Variants on the markings seem natural, and really help the poor gray egg stand out.

I've been wanting to write a post to break up the wall of images. In the last couple of weeks I've played about twenty games and painted about half a dozen ships, including my first commissions, so it's been pretty busy.

If you've been following this thread you know that I'm still a newbie painter, learning some pretty basic techniques. Every repaint I do is a learning experience. But I've already gotten some generous compliments about my work, and that's really encouraging. If I were to give one piece of advice to a new painter, it would be to do your research. Learn everything you can about brushes, paints, materials, techniques, etc. Watch tutorial videos, browse galleries extensively, save photos of ideas and techniques you like for reference. Don't put paint to a brush until you have a plan, practice working slowly and carefully, and maintain your "beginner's mind," always learning and refreshing yourself on the basics.

Like any other skill it's a matter of practice and not becoming discouraged. I've painted a few that didn't work out, some of which have been featured in this thread. I'll make sure to post my next epic fail.

In the spirit of addressing this to other beginners, I wanted to talk about commissions. It didn't take long before I got inquiries, and with a healthy sense of my own limits, I referred them to more experienced painters. I paint for my own enjoyment and never gave any thought to selling my work. In the last few weeks I've suddenly gotten a lot more inquiries, and the enthusiasm and persistence finally convinced me to take on some interesting opportunities that were in my comfort zone.

It turned out to be a very fun extension of the hobby. It's a real pleasure to work with people who like my work, who have a vision, and to collaborate with them to create something they'll enjoy. I've been careful not to take on too much, and to under-promise, and over-deliver. Right now I'm working on something interesting that I'm looking forward to sharing in a few weeks.

For myself I'm currently working on a new Royal Guard shuttle that I'm hoping will be a big improvement over my first one. I'm also working on a cloaked Phantom, and I'll probably do a Kath Scarlet and a new variant of a Blue Squadron B-Wing after those.

Welcome to commission painting. I started getting requests about a year ago so I suppose I don't have that much experience myself. While I had done some commission work in the past, it was for friends and the local club, so it doesn't really count.

The hands down hardest part with commissions is setting the price tag. I started low and has slowly worked my way up, basically checking at every step what people are prepared to pay, yet without gouging them. My rates are probably still too low but at least I can feel confident that my customers will be satisfied.