Spring Cleaning - with an AT-AT!

The first clone I wanted to paint and set the bar for the rest of the force is – of course – Captain Rex.

What I was a little apprehensive about at first was the clones’ armour – I still remember the painting sessions of my Imperial Jet Troopers for Imperial Assault and how time-consuming it was to paint and shade the white armour cleanly. Now that I’m painting Rex, however, I’ve become very confident about the long-term motivation for the clones, as the 501st clone troopers’ armour tells the stories of countless missions and battles and is dull, dirty and scratched up. This is fun to paint, and the coloured markings also add variety.

I have worked out a method for this that goes smoothly and achieves accurate results: As usual, the mini is primed with black and then misted with medium grey and white. In the next step, I give the whole mini a black wash – something I don’t usually do. I let the wash dry messy and then paint the gaps between the armour elements black. Then I do what was difficult with the Stormtroopers but is easy with the clones: I lighten the armour with different layers of transparent white. Since the armour is supposed to look dirty, one can proceed more loosely here than with the Stormies and hatch, dab and proceed more intuitively. This leaves different impressions of the unclean wash underneath, but the armour still looks white, and with opaque white you can add glossy accents on edges and on top of bulges that shimmer through the dirt and dust. It is important that in the end the edges are all cleanly defined and the raised areas are the brightest.

As for the blue markings, I first paint them cleanly with clear edges. In the second step, I use a very light grey on a very fine brush tip to make small scratches in the edges and extend them here and there into the blue areas. I also put a few tiny white dots over the scratches, and with very transparent white I add a few subtle gradients of brightness into the blue. I then dull the blue in some areas with diluted medium grey – it is also advisable to paint here and there with the transparent medium grey over the edges of the blue into the surrounding white, or over spots in the blue that were treated with the previous steps. In this way I get very authentic traces of wear – they consist of several steps, but they are quite quick to do.

Rex is almost finished, here are two pictures of the work in progress so far: