Painting Bad Batch Style! Star Wars Legion LAAT/le Part 3

Painting Bad Batch style seemed a little daunting when I first thought about it. While many of the Star Wars vehicles I’ve painted have a real studio prop to rely on, the Bad Batches “Havoc Marauder” does not. It’s a very stylized animation.

Examination of screen shots from the animated series showed a wildly varied streaked finish. It looked really cool, but I knew the finish was digital. I’d done things like that in Photoshop in my day job. But how in the world would I execute it on plastic?

Painting Bad Batch Style

Any time I try to emulate something in scale, I spend a bit of time examining the real thing – even if it’s basically a cartoon. As I stared at the screenshots I’d taken, it occurred to me that I was approaching it from the wrong angle.

The finish on the Havoc Marauder looked as it did NOT because it was painted that way, but because it was so weathered. In the series, the ship was constantly flying into various atmospheres, getting shot at, zooming through space -you name it.

So what I saw was not paint, really. It was the wear and tear. The paint was almost an afterthought.

Thus the approach was not to paint the model and then weather it. Rather, it would be to base it in a shadow color, and then apply the paint in a weathering fashion.

So instead of laying down opaque, smooth coats, I fell back on streaking. While it’s normally a weathering technique, I switched it up to a painting technique. Using lower opacity paint means the darker base is not fully covered. Layers of the paint applied as streaks gave a random finish. Tonal variation contributed to the randomness. I even had a Bob Ross “happy accident”. And accidental streak of color from a glaze proved to be the final piece in the puzzle.

I certainly won’t claim that it’s a “Clone” of the Bad Batches Marauder. (See what I did there? 😉) But I think it definitely captures the style. And it was so simple to apply. All acrylic. All brush painted. no precision needed!

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