Somehow, Palpatine returned.

Cringe dialogue from a terrible film aside, I’ve painted my first Star Wars Legion models, starting with the two Biggest Bads. Darth Vader from the original core box, and Emperor Palpatine from, well, the Emperor Palpatine box.

I watched a couple of YouTube videos to get ideas on how to paint Vader, and used a lot of the ideas from Sonic Sledgehammer’s video in order to get him painted reasonably quickly.

Attempting to use different textures and very slight variations on blacks and greys to show the different materials on Vader’s armour and clothing.

As always, the flaws really stand out when the photo is blown up to this size, so the drybrushing looks rough and I can see some mould lines that made it through my extensive cleanup process. These PVC models in the Legion range – particularly the early ones are certainly not my favourites!

Papa Palpatine was a similar kind of paint process. No video required for inspiration, I just googled some images to re-familiarisie myself with the particular pallor of his skin in RotJ and copied the purple-hued grey.

Adding red-rimmed, yellowed and red-pulilled eyes that you can’t really see because of his hoodie. Slightly-differently-toned black that you can’t really tell apart, and a coat of gloss on his walking stick completed the model.

Something that you can see in these photos are the …chunks of paint on the sides of his robe, and a hair in the middle. All of which are basically invisible in hand, but have now been shaved off with a scalpel now that I’ve seen them in these massively blown up photos. As with most of the stuff I’ll be posting for a bit here, these models count towards both Dave Stone’s Paint What You Got Challenge 25-26, and also Anne’s 2026 Miniature Assembly Challenge.