Painted Gladiator Star Destroyers for Star Wars Armada

3D Prints from Tacticool Solutions

The two models were kindly provided by Tacticool Solutions here in the UK, and printed under licence.

The Painting Style

My painting style was inspired by posts by a user named Vyke (I think) on the old FFG forums.  His style involved shading and highlighting every hull panel individually, rather than approaching the hull as a whole. This takes way longer to do and looks less realistic, but is very eye catching!

My Objectives

Painting Panel by Panel

The panels worked out great – I am super pleased with the overall look of the ships themselves; I’ll certainly be using this same technique in the future.

Crew lights

I wanted to experiment with some Object Source Lighting with the crew lights. I’d not done this before so was a bit worried that I might screw up the underlying paint work.  They worked out OK, although the lights themselves are a little messy and un-even.

Varying Colours

The ships that inspired these Gladiators had quite a lot of colour variation around the hull – lots of tints different coloured tints.  I achieved effect this a little bit around the back of one of the Star Destroyers, but next time I will exaggerate the colouring since much of it is erased during the highlighting and shading work.