The Maintenance Bay for Shatterpoint consists of a single building, but it’s the largest piece of terrain for the game so far, and it has a lot of interesting details that should make for a fun painting challenge.
Assembly and Priming
When you get right down to it, the structure consists of a box, a short tower, and a wall, connected by a floor and an optional bridge. Putting it all together didn’t pose any particular challenges, but I did want to leave it in a few separate pieces to make it easier to get to the inner walls of the building. With that in mind, I left the floor piece and the section with the two pillars separate from the main building. Additionally, I left the robot arm detached, with the piece that snaps in place to attach it to its horizontal poles loose – I think the whole thing will be easier to store if I can keep the robot arm removable. I also left one of the inner wall control panels detached so it will be easier to paint the wall and hoses behind it.
Normally I don’t like to use spray primer, but past experience has shown that smooth walls don’t take brush-on primer particularly well. To make things easier I used two different colors of Army Painter spray primer: Matt Black for the floor piece, robot arm, and separate control panel, and Leather Brown for the two main structures and the womp rat.
Get Ready for a Lot of Drybrushing
After letting everything dry overnight, I set to work on the metallic floor, bridge, robot arm and control panel. For all three pieces I started with a heavy drybrush of Army Painter Gun Metal over the black primer, using a fairly large (3/4” wide) makeup brush – I find that the soft bristles are particularly good for drybrushing. I followed the Gun Metal with a lighter drybrush of Vallejo Model Air Steel to give the metallic pieces some lighter highlights.
Leaving the floor piece detached from the other two main building pieces made painting it a breeze, no awkward corners to get into.
The robot arm has three dangling hoses. I left the textured one alone, but painted the smooth hose with Army Painter Angelic Red, to add some color and contrast. The middle one looks like three thin hoses bound together – I painted these with Army Painter Matt Black and went back over the connecting bands in Gun Metal.
For the control panel I added a bit of Angelic Red and Reaper Linen White to the buttons, and painted the dangling wires in Angelic Red and Reaper Sun Yellow. The vast majority of the terrain piece is going to be silver and tan, so I wanted to add a few little splashes of bright color here and there.
With the metallic pieces done, I moved on to the two main building pieces. The walls start out pretty smooth, but with several layers of drybrushing I managed to not only get the uneven sandstone look I wanted, but also add a bit of stucco-like texture. I started with a very heavy drybrush in Army Painter Wasteland Clay over the Leather Brown primer, and followed that with another heavy drybrush layer, this time in Army Painter Barren Dune.
The walls were still a bit more yellow than I wanted, so I drybrushed a layer of Army Painter Ancient Stone, a light, warm grey that cut the Barren Dune’s yellow perfectly, giving me just the pale, sandstone shade I was after.
Filling in the Details
All that drybrushing over brown primer left me with quite a few details that would need to be picked out in silver to match the metallic pieces I had done earlier. Drybrushing solves a lot of painting problems, but it is messy and imprecise, so for most of these details I would need a different approach.
The platform/roof area of the main building has a gap for attaching bridges from the other terrain sets. I reasoned that I could use that as a margin between the tan and silver areas, so I painted the area that would eventually be silver in Army Painter Matt Black, which is supposed to be an exact match for their Matt Black spray primer. After giving that a chance to dry, I drybrushed over the black with the same colors I used on the metallic pieces earlier, Gun Metal and Steel. Then I went over the edge of the roof in a mix of Leather Brown, Barren Dune and Ancient stone, to clean up where silver had spilled over onto the edges of the platform.
For the rest of the metallic areas, however, I would need to do something different. I started by painting in all of these areas with Gun Metal, and then giving them a wash using Army Painter Dark Tone, taking care not to let the wash splash onto the sandstone walls, or pool too much at the bottoms of the various control panels and pipes. Once the wash had completely dried, I loaded up a very small makeup brush (about 3/16” in diameter) with Vallejo Steel and drybrushed some highlights, being very careful not to get any silver where I didn’t want it – since the sandstone color is the result of several translucent layers of different colors, it would be challenging to try to mix up an exact match for touch-ups.
Normally you want shadows, mid-tones, and highlights for each color, but I probably could have saved myself a bit of work by starting with a darker metallic color (or mixing some black in with the Gun Metal), and then skipping the dark tone wash all together. That would give me two tones for the metallic areas, which might be sufficient seeing that shiny metallic colors provide their own highlights. I may try that next time…
A Few Final Splashes of Color
With all the base colors done, it just remained to add some color to the control panels and dangling hoses. For all the Shatterpoint terrain pieces so far, I’ve done the hoses that hang along the upper edges of the walls in yellow and red, and I continued that here, painting them in Reaper Sun Yellow and Army Painter Angelic Red. I did the buttons on the control panels in alternating Angelic Red and Linen White, doing anything that looked like an on/off switch or a dial in Matt Black. Finally, I painted in the screens using a base of Reaper Sky Blue followed by a light drybrush in Linen White.
For the door on the main structure, I used the same technique I had used for the roof platform: base coat in Matt Black followed by drybrush layers in Gun Metal and Steel. The door frame provided a margin that helped me avoid splashing any silver onto the surrounding sandstone walls. I then did the tiles around the door frame in Reaper Rust Brown, followed by a very light drybrush in Reaper Yellowed Bone.
I did the light fixtures along the top edges last, painting them in Gun Metal and then going over the inner part in Linen White, followed by a Linen White drybrush under each fixture to simulate the lights.
I didn’t want to overthink the womp rat too much – I drybrushed the rock with the same sandstone layers, then painted in the fur with Reaper Wolf Grey, the face, legs and tail with Reaper Tanned Skin, and the inside of the mouth with Reaper Pale violet. I followed up with an Army Painter Strong Tone wash and a quick drybrush in Yellowed Bone once the wash had dried.
After a trial assembly, I decided that the edges of the bridge should be sandstone to match the sides of the buildings, so I painted them in Leather Brown and then drybrushed the same layers of Wasteland Clay, Barren Dune, and Ancient Stone.
Job Done
I don’t usually bother with varnish on terrain pieces, since they don’t get handled as much as miniatures do. In this case I also didn’t want to risk making the walls streaky or changing the stone-like finish I had managed to achieve.
For now I’ve decided not to glue all the pieces together – it seems to hold together just fine, and it will be easier to store if I can break it down into three relatively flat sections, and detach the robot arm.
I did decide on one final touch. The back wall has a few bland looking window shapes that I wanted to do something interesting with. I cobbled together an image of a landspeeder blueprint with some aurabesh text, printed it to fit the window shapes, and cut them out. I managed to get the size close enough that they stay in place without any glue, so if I change my mind about what I want in the windows in the future, I can swap it out.
I was thinking maybe the deleted scene from A New Hope where Luke runs into Biggs at Tosche Station, but I suppose I could do a bunch of different scenes, maybe to match up with all the different Mission Packs…
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