WARNING: CHOKING HAZARD!

Continuing the Star Wars theme from my previous post, here's the latest figure fresh off the painting desk; Star Wars: Legion - Darth Vader.

I'd put off painting him for such a long time, pushing him to the back of the queue in favour of other Star Wars: Legion figures. It's probably the thought of painting all that black. There's actually a lot of sculpted detail on the figure and I worried about it being lost with everything turning out a bit on the dark side. (See what I did there! 😉). 

The helmet was the first area to receive attention as I figured if I could get that to look right, everything else would flow from there. It took me a while to get a satisfactory result as to begin with I wasn't bold enough with my highlights. Possibly I could have gone even further with the highlights to give a really shiny effect, but decided to stop when I was happy with it and not push my luck too far. By this stage I was feeling a lot more confident about painting the rest of the figure.

For the cloak and clothing I started with varying shades of blue-grey and toned them down with successive black washes to add depth. This was followed by dry-brushing successively lighter layers of blue-grey to gradually bring out the highlights. This worked well as there is a lot of texture on the figure and the cloak has plenty of folds.

Before I started painting, I already had a good idea how I wanted the lightsaber to look and knew that using a single solid colour just wouldn't give the right effect. It needed to have that red aura, but with a white-hot center. I'd already experimented with painting a paler inner stripe along the length of the lightsaber on the Luke Skywalker figure, but I felt I could have been a bit braver with the contrast and wanted to try this on Vader's lightsaber. This was achieved by painting the lightsaber in an appropriate red base-coat, then adding a thin pink line along the length and then a thinner, almost white line on top. I used several very thin layers to build up the effect so the lines didn't appear too 'hard'. Second time around I was a lot happier with the final result. 

I did have to think carefully about the placement of the white stripe on the lightsaber as the effect only works best when viewed from certain angles. An obvious choice was along the top of the lightsaber when viewed from above as this is how the figure is most likely to be viewed on the tabletop. (See the picture below). I also painted stripes along each side of the lightsaber so these are visible when the figure is viewed from the left or the right. The second and third pictures above show this. I took them from angles that show off the effect to best advantage but on the tabletop, depending on the viewing angle,  you won't always see this. This is a compromise but I decided it still looks better than leaving the sides of the lightsaber plain red. I think the effect works best from angles where the reflected glow on the clothing is visible. 

Painting that red reflection did give me a headache as apart from a fairly cautious attempt on the Luke Skywalker figure, I have not tried painting Object Source Lighting (OSL) effects before. I was already really happy with how the figure had turned out and was worried that I'd mess up the OSL and spoil all my hard work. As it turned out, I achieved the effect I was looking for and do feel a lot more confident about trying more OSL effects in the future. It's always nice to learn a new technique. 

Painting this figure is something of a milestone as he is the last of the miniatures to be completed from my Star Wars: Legion core set. Looking back at the blog, I posted the first group of completed figures from the set about two-and-a-half years ago. Scarier still, it's been nearly four years since I first bought the set. Ah well, as I said in the very first post on this blog; "To begin is good. To continue is better. To finish is best".

May the force be with you!