Star Wars Legion: Tantive IV Base Painting Guide

When I showed off my Rebel Fleet Trooper I uploaded the painting guide for them on my Patreon; What I omitted at the time was how I painted the Tantive IV base. At the time I had no good photo angle for it and I also experienced some issues while painting it. Because of those reasons it was left out of the painting guide. I still wanted to put together a painting guide though, since some of you requested it. It took me a bit, but today is the day you get your wish:

Let us start with the painting card; I make and use these as a quick reference when painting by recipe. They are easy to have a quick idea what paints you need, but do not tell you much about the finer details. 

If you want to have an overview over all the cards available, you can join my Discord Server where I upload those that are publicly available. For those not publicly available you can get them either by subscribing to my Patreon or Ko-Fi or buy them for a one time payment. All of the money raised this way goes towards my Hobby and development of my game. 

Now with all that preamble out of the way, let us begin; You will need four paints and a light primer; The paints you need can be seen as above and are as follows:

• Army Painter Speedpaint Ashen Stone(or any light bluish white grey speedpaint equivalent; You could also use a bone colored one for a different look)
• Speedpaint Medium(or whichever medium is appropriate for the above used paint)
• Vallejo Sky Grey(or any light grey paint)
• White

You will also need a base, obviously. I bought up two blisters of the old Star Wars Legion moulded bases, but I am sure there are plenty of equivalent STLs that work too. You just need a vaguely Sci Fi corridor looking floor. 

Step 1

The initial prime can be any light colour. I used Wraithbone, because it is the least volatile of my light spray paints. You want a smooth finish, so your prime should not cover entirely and only give your paint a surface to stick to. I made that mistake the first time where I ended up having a slightly coarse texture, which affected later stages of the paint scheme. The next step is to basecoat the entire base with the Sky Grey, I forgot to take a picture of that, but just make sure it covers evenly. Be sure to use multiple thin coats and watch out for build up in the recesses, we do not want those. 

Step 3

The first pass of Ashen Stone is a mix of 7 parts Speedpaint Medium and 4 parts Ashen Stone; This mix ensures a thinner coverage and decent viscosity. Apply this broadly over the base; You might notice the paint curling in some areas, just quickly pass over it with the brush and it should cover decently again. Now once everything is covered you are not done yet. Take a thin brush with a decent belly and run it through the recesses to soak up excess paint. If you do not do this and let it dry, it will clog up the recesses. The end result should show most of the Speedpaint pooling towards the centre of deck plates. Give this stage a solid 20 minutes to dry at minimum. 

Step 4

The next step will require a round Drybrush or a make up brush. Before you put paint on it, dip it in some water and rub it vigorously into a paper towel to remove any paint still stuck in there. You would be surprised how much a little paint can tint bright white paints like Sky Grey. Once you ensured a clean and dry brush you want to softly drybrush the base with Sky Grey to strengthen the paint near the edges of deck plates. We achieve this by doing circular motions always going from an edge towards the inner area. Take your time with this until you have brightened up the edges a bit more.

Step 5

After the Drybrush you might notice a slightly chalky finish, to combat this, we are going to do another pass of Ashen Stone. This time the mix is a ratio of 1 part of Ashen Stone and 3 parts of Speedpaint Medium. Apply this only to the deck plates; Leave out the recesses unless you see any drybrush dust had collected in it after the previous step.

Step 6

This step requires quite a bit of brush control as we are going to glaze up some highlights. If you do not know what glazing is, I would point you to the myriad of Youtube tutorials on this technique as I do not think I can adequately explain it over text. That being said, you can also leave out this step and do a thick edge highlight with Sky Grey instead. If you feel up to the task, you are going to take Sky Grey and edge highlight the entire base; Once you are done you are going to glaze Sky Grey towards the edges. Do this as many times until you have a decent colour transition towards the end of each deck plate. 

Final Step

The final step is an edge highlight of White to finish off the base. Optionally you can apply weathering with white too such as scratches or dings. This leaves the top of the base done; I am not going to go over how to paint the base rim, as the colour used will depend on your army, project or preference. What I will tell you is to get a long brush with a decent belly and apply the paint in 3-4 thin layers across the rim, work methodically to not spill any on the top. For my Fleet Trooper I used Ionic Smart Colors Neutral Grey.

This wraps up my painting guide on Tantive IV style bases, I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful for your own projects. If you did, please let me know by leaving a comment. If you have any requests for a painting guide, you can do so via the comments as well and I will see what I can do. Lastly a reminder you can support me by joining either my Patreon or Ko-Fi or if you cannot afford to support me monetarily I always love seeing new faces on my Discord. Cheers!

Mail Day 28.07.2026 - Hicksy's Halflings and an old general

This morning I woke up to a lovely E-Mail telling me that a package had been delivered to my mail box; In the package were two sets of the Hicksy's Halflings range sculpted by Paul Hicks and sold by Footsore Miniatures; There was also a miniature of General Montgomery, a charity miniature supporting the Finley's Touch Charity. If you want to get one yourself, you can buy it here, there is also an accompanying vehicle sold by Mardav Miniatures here.

I have got some plans with these miniatures, so I already assembled three of them to paint tomorrow. The Monty will be my first historical personality I have ever painted. Not that I necessarily have an issue with it per se, but painting actual people, especially from eras like WW2 is a bit of a touchy subject. That being said, he is a charity miniature and I feel it thus justifies it in my mind. 

The other two miniatures are two of the Halflings; They will be painted up as soldiers of the Mootland and used in my Empire collection. These guys are beautifully sculpted and fit in decently well with the 6th edition Fantasy halflings. Their main distinctive characteristic are the faces. To say Paul Hicks has a special style of painting faces would be an understatement; Whenever I see a miniature where I am unsure if he sculpted it, its face is usually the giveaway. That being said, these Halflings have slightly softer sculpts, but still rock that distinctive Hicks style. This is it for today's mail day, just wanted to share the new arrivals! 

Konflikt 47: A Different Take On The Axis

This post contains spoilers for Wolfenstein The New Colossus.

While this by no means is the start of a new project; It is in part the introduction to a collection and painting idea I have and will be pursuing in the future. I have been positively enamoured with the new edition of Konflikt 47; The lore, the art and the miniatures all speak to me on that incredibly pulpy Wolfenstein-esque way. Now I have the obvious way to move forward with painting and collecting miniatures by extending my Italian collection into the year 1947. Sadly on the release they scrapped Italy as its own faction and even split the allied portion of the units between the US and the Brits. I did find a solution, but that is a story for another day. Today's post is about what I will be doing with the Axis models. I cannot deny they are amazing looking, but I really do not want to do more Nazis. The solution to this is simple and only partially inspired by Wolfenstein The New Colossus and how in it [SPOILERS!!!!] Blazkowicz is given the body of a lab grown Nazi super soldier to continue the fight against the regime. This was obviously not an idea unique to that game, but a proud tradition of resistance movements across history. Using the weapons of the enemy against them is poetic and iconic. From that my idea was born; I want to portray a resistance cell that has robbed multiple pieces of equipment and is using them against the axis. This would allow me to play using Axis models and rules, with modifications and Proxys here and there. The first attempt can be seen in this article on Tabletop Battles, I wanted to portray a suit of Stahlrüstung that was heavily battered and fixed by means less sophisticated. The suit has bits missing, a banged up camo job and is notably missing the big machine gun instead featuring a small SMG. I have yet to finish that miniature, but I think it is definitely one way I can go. Another presented itself when I received the two new Event exclusive miniatures for K47; The Stahltruppler had a lovely pose that I could modify as a standard bearer to serve as an officer in my force. This suit of armour would not be banged up though. Instead I was imagining the cell raiding a factory or transport and scavenging factory new suits of Stahlrüstungen.

Being new the suit would not be painted yet and so I wanted to give the armour a look of fresh steel plating. I admit metallics are one of my less developed skills and so I practiced a speckled look on this miniature. I cannot say I am 100% satisfied with the result, but it is definitely going in the right direction. As you can see I decided to use the masked head from the Firefly which was the other event exclusive. The thinking here is in keeping with historical precedent, that this is an allied paratrooper who joined up with the cell to guide their efforts and offer advice. I might actually try and flesh out some more concrete lore on this, but for now I can say this with certainty: The resistance cell is originally a Czech group near the German border and as such also feature a contingent of German resistance fighters which is how they managed to get these suits.

With some more color that is not metal I think he is coming along nicely. I am uncertain yet how I want to style the Cell's iconography, but I imagine they would paint it on the chest plate to ensure these guys are identifiable in combat. That said I do think it would be fun to try and do another suit of armour that was stolen from an active unit and looks just believable enough for the cell to infiltrate the enemy perimeter without being immediately found out. I would imagine it would have a lot more scratches and dings and maybe a not so obvious bullet hole where they shot the previous inhabitant. In any case I will upload photos when I finish this officer and maybe add some more fleshed out lore. I do like that this is not going to be some major project, but an outlet for me to flex my creative muscles whenever I find a model that speaks to me. Truthfully that is how I see a lot of my painting endeavours. Thank you for reading and let me know what you think of this idea and what unique Weird War ideas you have maybe?