There’s a great video by Uncle Atom, where he observes the adage: “They can’t all be bangers.” But sometimes your not-bangers can still kind of be bangers, which is the essence of the miniature I have come to endearingly call “Sassy Luke.” I’ve mentioned before that one of my weakest areas in miniature painting is being able to paint faces and paint face details. And for whatever reason, this awesome 3D-printed Luke Skywalker pilot miniature was completely unwilling to cooperate with me on his facial shading and highlighting. Big kudos to Wargames3D for the print on this.

Of course, as the immortal Bob Ross observed, everybody needs a friend. And since I had previously built and sent my R2-D2 to my parents as part of a Christmas diorama, I got a print of everyone’s favorite astromech to go along with Sassy Luke. I’m very happy with how he turned out, and I think that having the practice of doing an R2 a year ago really paid off here. I kept the paint jobs on these pretty straightforward, and kept the basing pretty straightforward too – Armageddon Dust, Agrax Earthshade, and Ushabti Bone, like pretty much all of the rest of my Rebels.

This, of course, is only the beginning. These are part of the theme I’m running with for my Rebel “characters.” (The pilot thing, of course, not the sass, though I’m sure they’ll still be plenty sassy.) I’ve always really liked Rebel pilots as characters – if there was a Legion box just of pilots, I’d have probably picked one of those up. And it also gives me a fun angle I can play with when I get to the point where I add larger vehicles, like Snowspeeders or…well, other proxies and things.

So…yeah. Ultimately, maybe not a banger compared to the last Luke Skywalker character I painted up, but I think there’s things with this I feel like I did a little better, and things (like the face) that I feel like I did a little worse. But in this case I feel like it just gives the miniature more personality and I’m happy with the result. More pilot shenanigans to come soon.