Death Troopers
Welcome to the third installment of my painting blog. Last week, I squared away some Imperial heroes, including Director Krennic. While Veers and the Imperial Officer are perfectly at home among the normal Stormtroopers of the Galactic Empire, the good director never leaves home without a detachment of his elite Death Troopers. So today I will talk about the squad I painted up to keep Director Krennic company.
As with the Stormtroopers, the death troopers were primed grey after I assembled and cleaned them. I have to say they went together very nicely and required very little work to finish to my statistication. I decided that I would stick close to the script for this squad and they would be decked out in their normal black. For playability reasons, I decided that the sergeant would wear an orange pauldron, to stay consistent with other squad leaders, while the DLT gunner’s pauldron would be red. This would make them easy to identify on the table and add some color to the unit.
Since Death Troopers are black, the base coat was easy and the entire model was painted black. I did two thin coats of black as is my standard. I could have primed them black, but I was lazy and actually primed them with the heroes from last week. When you are painting any color, but especially a dark color, you don’t want to apply the paint too heavily. Multiple thin coats is always preferable. Heavily applied paint can hide detail and tends to flake or chip off more easily, since the paint is bonding to itself and not to the surface of the model.
I then went back and painted the base color for the pauldrons and added metallic to the gun barrels and other pieces of kit before I painted green on their eyes and the ammo pouches dark brown. To give some depth to the black, I dry brushed the entire model with the same dark grey I used for the first layer of the Stormtrooper’s armor. Then their bases were painted with the technical paint, and the entire model was washed with black wash.
Sold black can be tricky because it can look very flat. Since I had already decided that my army was going to be weathered, I didn’t want them to be flat and that is what the grey dry brush was for. I added some weather on the feet and lower legs before going back with black to ensure there was no question of their armor’s color. I focused on large flat areas and any recessed or shaded spots. I then did a little edging with the dark grey and then in some select arms a highlight with a (very) dry brush of light grey.
My second tract of reinforcements came in this last week. It was substantially more than the lot before and I feel that it should hold me over under the next new release hits sometime in July or August. I will see you next week.