Starcraft TMG - Zealot Test Scheme

“Honor guide me.”
Y’all remember those StarCraft voice lines?

I’d had my eye on the tabletop game in the lead-up to its release, and once I found a local crew to play with, I finally pulled the trigger on the Protoss starter set. This Zealot is the first model out of the box and my test scheme for the rest of the squad. I started out aiming for something close to the classic in-game look, but as usually happens with minis, I learned the sculpt while painting it and gradually got pulled in a few different directions.

It was a really fun model to work on. The StarCraft minis are a little larger than the Games Workshop models I’ve mostly painted in the past, and they felt spacious after those tiny frickin dwarves I was working on. The kits also include a few transparent plastic parts, and I wanted to see if I could preserve that effect after painting. Masking everything turned out to be more arduous than I’ll probably care to repeat across the whole army. I also tried a technique I saw in a Vince V video: applying matte varnish as a primer, then using transparent paints to stain the recesses and add definition without completely losing the transparency.

I didn’t quite get the result I wanted. The color darkened the pieces more than I expected, but that’s what test models are for. I’ll probably just paint those bits as normal for the other models in the unit. It’s also been refreshing to paint some sci-fi again after spending so much time in the fantasy genre. The games I’ve played with the local crew have been an absolute blast, so there will probably be plenty more StarCraft minis around here for a while.

Did y’all play the original games? Anybody else getting into the tabletop game?
Good models. Good game. Good times.