If you only knew the power of the Dark Side

Keeping up with my Shatterpoint painting, after finishing my core box I bought some expansions to allow me to play as the Empire. I got one pretty sweet deal for the Darth Vader box and the Inferno Squad box, so I'm currently working on building a complete functional imperial squad.

One of the hardest things about painting Star Wars is that there are a lot of pure white and pure black elements that are particularly difficult to paint if you want them looking right. Particularly because, being pop culture references, everybody knows pretty well how they should look.

Stormtroopers in particular were a hassle as I had to use several near-white colors to get them to look interesting and with enough volume but yet making sure they looked the right kind of white. Despite the increased scale I was surprised at how difficult it was to make them look the way I wanted.

Even then to capture the different white tones with my camera, the orange pauldron on the stormtrooper sergeant ended up looking way more saturated than it is with the mini at hand.

On the other side I had a very clear vision for how I wanted my Darth Vader to look. I always play with the OSL on my jedi and sith miniatures but in Darth Vader in particular I wanted the mini to not only have the red of his own lightsaber but also the blue coming from an outside source, as a reference to the good still inside him. You can also think of it as him dueling Obi-Wan or Luke and thus having their saber reflected on his suit.

If you turn the miniature around you can clearly see that one side has only blue edge highlights while the opposite has only reds, playing to the duality of the character.