Paint Recipe | A Menage a Tie

Sadly, my pun is off by a bit, as there are more Tie fighter varieties in this post than three. I let myself sleep at night by telling myself that the bomber doesn't count as a fighter, and the Decimator is just kinda... a thing, and the Tie Phantom is there. The other three are actually fighters. Pun saved. Anyways, I'll do a quick paint recipe of these guys. Because they don't need much, and are honestly a little boring to paint. But, it's the classic scheme, and it needs going over. Eventually, I'll get to cooler color varieties. 

Sadly, when I got some excellent advice from Dave Stone about the different color varieties of all the Tie fighters, I had already slapped all the colors on and gone through the painful process of painting all the panel lines on the solar panels. So the next round of these guys will have some more color variety. I have plenty of Tie Fighters left. 

The flying billiard balls.

The painting is super simple. A basecoat of AP Ash Grey, with a very thinned down application of GW Nuln Oil in the recesses to pull some detail out. The panels are AP Matt Black, and this is where the brunt of the work came in will all of these models. I'd paint some of the black on, then the grey, but the grey would get on the black, and so on. Edge highlighting with the side of the brush helped a lot, but getting clean lines took some work. 

Then the engines got a little dot of AP Dragon Red. There's no sculpted engine detail, so you'll have to eye the best spots to put them. As one last little detail, I painted the tips of the gun with GW Moot Green. I know that usually the tips are shown red, and they only shoot green laser beams, but I didn't want the front and back to look so similar. Plus, it added a nice spot color to the model that's barely visible when you're playing. Then a varnish to protect the model and a gloss coat for the canopy window to complete the look.

From there I just did the same thing on most of the other fighters. Interceptors: same thing. 

The flying billiard balls with pointy angry triangles.

Tie Advanced: same thing. Except they got four engine dots instead of two. Which makes one wonder why they keep the Twin Ion Engine designation. 

Only made so you could tell which one was Darth Vader. 

Tie Bomber: Same thing. Except bigger. 

The fat one. 

Then we have the VT-49 Decimator. Which is a thing that....exists. It's what happens when the Millennium Falcon and a Tie Fighter have a baby. It apparently first showed up in a Star Wars mobile game, which makes sense. It got the same paint job as the rest, except this time, it got a drybrushing of GW Pallid Wych Flesh mixed with AP Matt White. 

Why do you exist? Why is this photo so blurry? 

And the Tie Phantoms got the same treatment as the Decimator, but with just a bit more white mixed in to the final drybrush. 

The sneaky ones. 

The engines look pretty cool on these guys though, I will say. 

The Tie Defender will show up at some point, but I was burnt out with all of the clean lines, and that thing is all panels. So until next time.

-The Space Dinosaur