It's a good bet the Empire knows we're here...

Painted up the pack of Probe Droids from Star Wars Imperial Assault. They were painted vaguely following the tutorial Sorastro put up on Youtube - vaguely in that I watched it a couple of months before starting painting, and then watched it again once I was too far into the painting process to change anything.

I went for a fairly dark scheme, with some bright nicks of weathering. The bases took some more doing than usual, as since the models are so flimsy there was a lot of careful glueing involved to get them to bond to their new bases, which seemed to disagree with the sand staying where I wanted it. Two were glued using tiny contact points, whereas the third I managed to trim down the base without the legs all snapping off and so smoothed the edges down with filler before applying grit and sand.

To make the Elite figure stand out, I decided to give it red lenses and some markings - cue some frantic digging through every Star Wars reference book in my house looking for a reference chart of Aurebesh (the Star Wars alphabet) only to discover that it's in the Star Wars Miniature Battles rulebook, which is Uncle Johnny's, so I googled it:

If you peer at it, you can just about make out AB172 on the side of the Elite probe droid (chosen for the same reason my Fallout survivor is from Vault 172), as well as very carefully painting an Aurek on top of the droid. I then looked at it at arm's length and figured that the small red symbol wasn't obvious enough to differentiate between the different droids, so I repainted the entire panel red and repainted the Aurek in white. Then, as per the Sorastro video, I gave all of the lenses a coat of GW 'Ardcoat to give them a glossy, reflective finish.

Tally:

24 vs 40 = -16

In other news, I spent part of my afternoon sieving bits of shell out of Wilkos £1 bird sand. After explaining to our local Labour MP that that was what one of the two tea strainers my daughter was holding was for when she asked. As you do.