Two of my favorite things are miniature painting and Christopher Lee, so naturally, at 1am last Wednesday, I impulse ordered Count Dooku for my Star Wars Legion separatist army – and painting him to a standard I’m proud of was surprisingly swift and stress free! So much, in fact, that I thought I’d knock up a brief tutorial to help you do it too.
As with all our painting advice, if you’re new to the hobby, I recommend you dip into our complete beginner’s guide to painting miniatures first to get a feel for the main stages and techniques. Like many Star Wars Legion minis, Dooku’s personality comes more through his excellent pose and movie-accurate face than lots of fancy, fiddly details to paint – but it’s always worth brushing up on the fundamentals.
That said, this little walkthrough involves nothing high-tech, no high level techniques, and no funny business, so should be accessible for pretty much all painters. I didn’t use contrast paints this time (though I love using them – see my Tyranid army for proof).
I didn’t use an airbrush either (mine is in dire need of a good cleanout) – though I will include a tip on how to improve Dooku using one at the end. It’s just prime, base colors, washes, and layers – and I’ll list out all the paints I used as I go along.
Priming – things can only get better!
In some ways, this article should also be a reassuring reminder that getting something badly wrong in a paint job is rarely unfixable – because I really messed up priming my Dooku.
I used the one can of black spray I had left – a generic, non miniature specific brand that claimed to be ‘Matt’ and proved (as you can see in the image above) to be both glossy and gloopy – the opposite of what you want. I was petrified my base coats wouldn’t adhere to this grainy, shiny mess, and I’d have to strip him and start again.
Luckily, with a few prayers to the Wills – and unshakeable faith in one-time Warhammer TV supremo Duncan Rhodes’ mantra of ‘two thin coats’, I prevailed, and the base coats went on pretty nicely.
Base coats and shades
My general plan for the model was to go with a very simple color scheme, but use bold, stark highlights to make key colors stand out on the tabletop – most especially the black tunic and boots; the cloak; and, of course, Christopher Lee’s magnificent, stentorian face.
This delightfully understated model already has just a few, subtle ‘accent’ points – the belt buckles, the cloak chain, the saber and hilt, and Dooku’s face and hair. I wanted my model’s stand-out features to be the tunic, cloak, and face – the most visible from tabletop distance.
So, my base colors:
- Tunic and boots – Abaddon Black
- Cloak interior and Lightsaber blade – Mephiston Red, shaded with Carroburg Crimson
- Cloak exterior – Naggaroth Night, shaded with Druchii Violet
- Lightsaber hilt, cloak chain, and belt buckles – Leadbelcher, shaded with Nuln Oil
Dooku’s skin starts out as the classic Citadel paint progression for caucasian skin – and, to bring the face and hair tones together, I base coated both first, then shading the entire head with a flesh tone.
- Face and neck – Bugmans Glow, shaded with Reikland Fleshshade.
- Hair – Mechanicus Standard Grey, shaded with Reikland Fleshshade.
The head was the one area where my disappointingly thick spray primer caused problems with my base coating. The slightly blobby finish obscured some of the model’s detail, making my life much harder when picking out the areas of skin and hair.
It means my finished face could be much better – but equally, it’s a reminder that careful layering and highlights can still create something decent from a messy start! Just make sure to keep your base coats nice and thin, and be patient – every additional coat will lose a bit more detail, you see. One doesn’t rush faces, especially one as iconic as Lee’s.
Layers and Highlights
I’m a terrible one for being too timid and understated with my highlights, such that they end up being invisible on the tabletop. So I set out to go very crisp, bright, and sharp with Dooku – especially on the cloak (always an opportunity for flair) and, more challengingly, on the black tunic and boots.
Dooku is a model with a lot of large, single color areas with raised bits, so I wanted to use those prominent textures to make the main colors pop, leaving no part of the model totally flat-colored.
The cloak
I love purple, so I threw canon to the wind and made the outside of Dooku’s cloak a bright purple, keeping the inside the movie-accurate scarlet.
Cloak exterior:
- Layer – Xereus Purple
- Highlight 1 – Genestealer Purple
- Highlight 2 – 50/50 mix of Genestealer Purple and Dechala Lilac
Cloak interior:
- Layer – Evil Sunz Scarlet
- Highlight – Wild Rider Red
On both sides of the cloak, I played it very straight – layering progressively brighter colors in narrower and narrower streaks along the ridges of the material – using thinned washes of Druchii violet (for the outside) and Carroburg Crimson (for the inside) to blend out some of the harsher contrast in between layers.
Wet-blending these colors, using more mixes at different gradations of red and purple, would have made the cloak much better – but a) I’m not very good at wet blending and b) I wanted to get Dooku done inside of three hours.
In the spirit of keeping the overall color pallet simple and cohesive, I painted Dooku’s belt the same as the red inner cloak – and left the belt buckles unhighlighted, dull metal – they’re not the accent point here, after all.
I followed the exact same red progression for the lightsaber blade – but took it further after Wild Rider Red with two extra highlights:
- 50/50 mix of Wild Rider Red and Pink Horror
- Pink Horror
I’m still learning lightsabers, to be honest. I’m not totally happy with it, and it might need a brighter zenithal highlight – but for now it’ll serve.
The tunic and boots
As I’ve learned from years of trying to paint my Black Templars in a way that actually looks good – painting black well is hard. But I really like stark, grey-to-white zenithal highlights that make black cloth and leather look realistic, so I challenged myself to give it a go.
- Layer – Mechanicus Standard Grey
- Highlight 1 – Dawnstone
- Highlight 2 – Ulthuan Grey
This was the second most time consuming part of the paint job, as I really wanted to make sure the highlights precisely followed the natural rumples of the material, so that, when I came in with the ultra-bright Ulthuan grey top level highlight, it wouldn’t just end up a chaotic scribble.
Luckily, the modern Abaddon Black is a lovely, rich black base coat which takes on a useful, light catching matt finish when washed lightly with Nuln Oil. This made it much easier to trace a fat highlight of M.S. Grey along each of the creases, then work up to Dawnstone, and finally Ulthuan Grey.
Incidentally, top tip for painting both black and white – you should almost never use pure white (Titanium White, in artist’s terms, or White Scar in Citadel-ese). It’s simply too strong, and will overwhelm your darker highlights completely. Ulthuan Grey tends to be my brightest ‘white’ highlight – with a very occasional dot of White Scar on points and corners. Technically, I used zero white paint for this model.
The face
Dooku’s face is really the focal point of this model, which was a bit of a problem, for three reasons:
- Like most intermediate painters, I’m not great at painting faces.
- Painting faces well takes a long time, and I set a 3 hour time limit.
- My crappy priming job had already nixed some of this model’s lovely facial detail.
But I pressed on, following the standard Citadel progression for pale skin:
- Layer – Cadian Fleshtone.
- Highlight 1 – 50/50 mix of Cadian Fleshtone and Pallid Wych Flesh.
- Highlight 2 – Pallid Wych Flesh.
For Dooku’s hair, beard, and eyebrows, I used the same grey-to-white progression as for the tunic and boots, keeping my brush strokes as light and narrow as possible, to build up a texture and leave some depth and shade. I periodically dashed a little bit of thinned down Reikland Fleshshade into the recessed areas of the hair to keep as much definition as possible.
Finally, that bugbear of all mini painters: the eyes. I painted Dooku’s eyes the only way I know how:
- Very carefully dab a tiny amount of thicker-than-usual Pallid Wych Flesh onto the eyeballs, and wait for them to dry.
- Shade the eye areas again with thinned down Reikland Fleshshade.
- Paint a very thin vertical line of Abaddon Black in the middle of each eyeball.
- Come back in with the tiny brush-tip of P.W. Flesh, and gingerly tidy up any rough edges of your black pupils.
Using a little less water than usual in the pale fleshtone for the eyeballs ensures the paint doesn’t run wild and pool in the eye socket, forcing you to wipe off and start over (something I’ve done about 3,452 times). Just make sure your brush has only a very small load of paint, breathe deeply before starting, and go sloooow.
They ain’t perfect – my rough priming job left very little margin for tinkering on the eye details – but I’m happy with the result and, as ever, painting the eyes at all brings the model to life a great deal.
Against the odds, I’m very, very pleased with how my Count Dooku came out – especially against my self imposed time limit of three hours. Naturally, that breaks down into maybe 40 minutes of base coating and shading, two straight hours of layering and highlighting, and 20 more minutes of messing about fixing things.
If my airbrush had been up and running (and I’d allowed some extra time) I would have tried some yummy Original Source Lighting (OSL) to show the red glow from Dooku’s saber against his tunic leg and boot – a light spray of darker Khorne Red, then a more focused burst of Mephiston Red on top. A tale for another time.
For now, this model has inspired me to get a few of my unpainted characters for various Warhammer 40k factions painted (finally) – but, since I’m on a Star Wars Legion kick right now, next on the painting desk is most likely another late night impulse buy: the mighty AAT droid army battle tank. Watch out for a painting guide in the near future.
In the meantime, you can find some other banging ‘Wars flavored tabletop treats in our buyer’s guide to the best Star Wars board games – or check out some alternative skirmish titles in our guide to the best miniature wargames available.
We can also recommend you our favorite miniature paintbrushes, and what we’ve found to be the best paints for miniatures.
Source: Wargamer
