May the Fourth be with a really big gun

As is traditional, May the Fourth means I’ve painted something Star Wars themed, and this year it’s ‘Mandalorian with large weapon, Paz Vizla’:

I have a bunch of Star Wars minis in the backlog, but this one got chosen because it looked cool in the cabinet while we were chatting with Tim Prow at the Diehard Miniatures stand at Salute, so he got bought and accelerated up the painting queue. I also tried painting heat stained metal for the first time (inspired by the studio paint job), which came out… fine. Something to work on in the future perhaps (as every tutorial I saw said use an ink and dry brush, but whenever I went to dry off my brush all the pigment leached off completely, so I tried to glaze with washes instead which could have benefitted from slower going, but a deadline is a deadline).

While the miniature isn’t completely identical to his inspiration, I did use stills from the Mandalorian to work out which bits of armour should be which colour, as his colour scheme is pleasingly slightly asymmetrical.

Then it was a case of adding a little weathering to make him look suitably battle worn, and job’s a good’un!

He also is the first recipient of one of the grass tufts that I picked up at Salute, which are a lot bigger on a mini than they look on the paper!

Fun fact - Most of these base coats were applied in a Holiday Inn in Basildon:

Speaking of things looking bigger, this mini is actually surprisingly small - I was prepping him at the same time as some Tangent minis, which I thought were giant, but they actually looked larger next to this chap. Here he is next to a Warlord mini, to give you an idea of scale:

Which is interesting, as I remember the Mando that I got from Diehard being on the larger side. Alas, he’s boxed up, otherwise I’d dig him out and compare the two…

As well as painting this mini, I’ve also received a couple. The sample mini from Gringo 40s arrived:

As did a Made to Order Warhammer Empire Battle Standard bearer that I preordered a while ago:

So all in the Tally now looks like:

9 vs 206 = -197

What’s next? I’ve still got some Superheroes in various states of completion, and I really want to crack on with some Alamo project miniatures, but on the other hand I also watched the entirety of the Third Doctor serial ‘Spearhead from Space’ today while cooking a roast, so who knows…