I was lucky enough to be able to pick up the Shatterpoint Hello There and Twice the Pride expansion packs at the UK Games Expo.
Twice the Pride is in the first wave of expansions for Shatterpoint, and consists of Count Dooku, Jango Fett and two Magnaguards. I particularly want to put together a Mandalorian force, so any Mandalorian is a good addition for me.
With figures based on movies/comics/cartoons/etc one of the first steps is gathering some reference images.
Reference Images
There are actually a number of differences between the movie Jango Fett and the Shatterpoint Jango Fett, the most obvious being the backpack. Fett has a fairly simple colour scheme, with a medium grey, a dark grey, a light grey, a leather brown and then silver armour and dark blue on the helmet.
I ditched the grey of the bodysuit for another colour to increase the contrast with the armour, but that was a personal choice to not be movie accurate (just go with his light grey bodysuit and medium grey vest are in the wash, as on a desert planet he must be sweating like crazy in that).
Magna Guard in Revenge of the Sith – copyright Lucasfilm
Magna Guard are bodyguard droids for important Separatist personages like General Grevious and Count Dooku. The Star Wars Legion Magna Guard have a whole range of weapons. In the films and Clone Wars series we see them with and without cloaks (and I really question the utility of them having cloaks anywhere they don’t need dust/sand covers) but the Shatterpoint ones stick to the cloaks and don’t have the option to build them without them, which I would personally have liked.
In Revenge of the Sith we see one painted blue (though wear and tear has taken a lot of that paint off around the joints) and they’re a model that benefits from scratches and weathering being painted onto them to give them that lived in feel.
Count Dooku here has a lot of dark colours, something changed for the Clone Wars cartoon where the belt was lightened significantly to give the character more visual interest and make them less like a very dark tube.
My Dooku I painted up fairly quickly. I would very strongly advise leaving the head separate if you are painting the cloak separately, as trying to get the cloak on with the head in place is a very tight fit.
Assembly and Preparation
Obligatory sprue pictures. Shatterpoint has a standard scenic base sprue, and the expansions have all models on a single frame. The cutting of the models is superior to Marvel Crisis Protocol, especially the early sprues, and there are no pieces that are tiny, delicate and incredibly easy to lose. You do need to be careful clipping pieces from the sprue, especially lightsabers, and I cut the sprue spur and then clip the spur from the piece using fine detail cutters.
I started with putting magnets on the bases with gorilla glue prior to touching anything else. These models will be stored in magnetic trays and two magnets per base should be enough to prevent them sliding around and getting damaged. The lightsabers are long and thin and I don’t want to chance them with foam trays. Being long and thin they’ll likely be a pain to repair, so better not to break them in the first place.
I would highly recommend using either one pretty big magnet or two magnets placed at opposite edges of the base. This prevents models rotating in the box during transport and banging each other. The magnets I used are 2mm by 5mm. I’d also recommend just getting these magnets glued in as soon as you get the box. I’ve done all the bases in all the sets immediately, so when I get round to doing the other teams the bases are already done. It is a lot fiddlier putting magnets on bases where there is a miniature on it than just gluing them in while it is still on the sprue like this.
I built the models and glued them to the bases. I used Tamiya ultra thin polystyrene cement, and left the cloaks as separate pieces because of how much of the body of the model wearing them would be hard to paint with them on, and vice versa. If I were to do it again I would paint Dookus head as a sub assembly as well. I also found Tamiya extra thin led to some fragile joins between feet and bases, and had to go back and reglue them later as the small amount of pressure caused by painting caused them to pop off the base. You can see Dooku got gorilla glued in the picture below.
I spraying the models with Chaos Black spray from Games Workshop, and then underpainted them to define the later highlights, using a mix of greys and whites. The paint going over this would be a mixture of contrast and normal paints, and with the exception of Jango Fett, I wanted to turn these out to a reasonable tabletop standard as quickly as possible.
The Magna Guard were probably the easiest and most satisfying models to turn out.
I applied a 50/50 mix of Basilicanum Grey and Contrast Medium all over, and then took a brush and some Vallejo Chrome and feathered wear and tear around the joints and edges where the paint would be scraped. I also used the chrome to paint the pistons and internal workings of the droid.
Once this had been done I gave the model a coat of gloss varnish and then pinwashed a number of the seams on the model to give even more definition to the various plates and edges. I did the cloak in a few thin coats of Rakarth Flesh with a wash of Agrax Earthshade, with an extra bit of wash along the bottom of the cloak to show a build up of dirt from being dragged on the floor.
Jango Fett was done very simply. The body suit was painted with Incubi Darkness, the leather with XV88 and the armour with Iron Hands Steel. The bodysuit and armour was washed with Nuln Oil and then highlighted with thinned down Sons of Horus Green.
Fett benefited from the same process used with the Magna Guard, chrome was used to put wear and tear and scratches on the armour, and panel lining was used to increase definition between colours and textures.
Count Dooku I just powered through, and extreme close ups are quite unforgiving (you can see the tiny mould line on the fingers for example). The model is to a fine tabletop standard. I broke up the black for the purposes of visual interest, going with Black Legion Contrast for the tunic, Basilicanum Grey Contrast for the breeches and Snakebite Leather Contrast for the belt. The skin was Cadian Fleshtone base, Reikland Fleshshade wash and then a thin Pallid Wych Flesh highlight.
Conclusion
I completed these in three evenings of painting, with only a couple of hours per evening. Using contrast sped the process up significantly in turning out tabletop quality miniatures, and I’ve not done a lot with the bases (though may come back and do more with them when I have six squads or so and can batch paint them to polish them up).
The Magna Guard I would have preferred if there were optional pieces to do them without cloaks, as a skeletal and menacing profile is broken up a lot by the cloaks, and they don’t always use the cloaks in the source material.
Dooku benefits a lot by breaking him up with different but complementary colours. A dark tunic, dark trousers and dark cloak don’t all have to be the same dark colour, and I think this is a better choice than a movie accurate dark tube.
Jango I liked most as a miniature, as I have a soft spot for Mandalorian/the Fetts in terms of miniatures/costumes in the films/series. I’m hoping it will be possible soon to run a non-Jedi all Mandalorian/Bounty Hunter force (I know one bounty hunter primary is coming, but we need two). Jango is the miniature I’m happiest with the paint job on.
As a group it was a fairly easy build, and a fairly quick project. I think one of Shatterpoints strengths is that generally it’s one character and then three models using variations on the same scheme, which makes it fairly easy to get them to tabletop standards.
The models are ‘truescale’ which means longer legs and smaller guns and heads, and I’m fine with this. The heads are about the same size as a GW figure, while the models are 40mm as oppose to ‘heroic’ 28mm. This means a six and a bit foot clone trooper is roughly the same height as a eight and a bit foot primaris marine, but a lot thinner in the body and limbs.
The Twice the Pride box is a nice little project giving some much needed variety to the dark side forces in Shatterpoint, and the miniatures are good representations of the characters and easy to build and paint.
