Painted Rebel Commando Unit for Star Wars Legion

I wanted to paint up a unit of Rebels to a higher standard than I’ve done previously.  I find the rebel units much more time consuming to paint because the model have much more variety than the Empire, Republic or Separatist equivalents. This does make them more interesting to paint, however.

Using More Colours

At the risk of stating the obvious, the more colours you use on a set of minis, the longer they take to paint.  Half the time I can’t remember what colour I’ve used where as I typically have many projects on the go at once and paint pots get put away and moved about as I go.

In this case I think it really helped the look of the unit to have a few more colours used in their base coat – a couple of greens and light brown.  This allows for some variety between models, but keeps some consistency so they are not all over the place.

Messy Camo Accident

I initially attempted to do a contrasty wash of the lighter green clothing using a brown wash, and then a dark green wash. This failed and looked a bit shit.  I had to spend quite a bit of time rescuing the colour by manually adding layers of darker green in the shadows and then some highlights. 

The results though, were quite good – I had accidently created a subtle mottled camo pattern on some of the green clothing which gives the minis loads of depth.

I’ll need to try this again in the future but do it deliberately this time! 

(Also, ‘Messy Camo Accident’ makes for a good band name 😃)

Basing on Geonosis / Mars

My new favourite base is a an orange/red Martian rock look.  Bases like this provide great contrast to most model colours and here the orange goes quite well with the greens and browns.