Staff Hobby Feature – Anne Paints Queen Padmé Amidala

One of my personal favorite characters in Star Wars™ is Padmé Amidala™, so you can imagine I was very excited to get my hands on the We Are Brave Squad Pack from Star Wars: Shatterpoint. As many folks in our community express, painting a character you’re excited about brings both the joy of seeing a beloved character on the table and the pressure of doing them justice. Lucky for me, I’m a hobby painter who also works at Atomic Mass Games! This means I can learn new tricks and techniques from people who have been at this for quite some time so I can keep improving my own work.

For each miniature I tackle, I think about what I want to learn or practice. Padmé was no different. First, I wanted to practice the blending and transitions between shadows and highlights on the gown. Our Creative Director, Dallas, often uses a technique where he’ll lay down a color and then use a wet brush to drag the pigment away from the high point to create a smooth blend. I’ve been working on that myself, but knew it would be integral to getting the dynamic flow of color on her gown. But before I could start painting, I had to select the colors.

Previously, I always used a darkened shade of the base coat for the shadowed areas that I brightened up to a lighter version of that color on the high points. That’s why when Dallas used our studio miniature of Queen Padmé Amidala to describe how shadows on red fabric looks blue and highlights are orange-ish, it broke my brain a little bit. Both the highlights and shadow are what give the red its richness! It all clicked and I immediately wanted to try that on my miniature. I mixed a little prussian blue and burnt orange with the base tone of red for my shadows and highlights respectively and practiced a two brush blending technique to create a smooth transition with the original red as the midtone between them. This was the first time that blending technique really came together for me and I’m looking forward to continuing to practice it.

The other thing that I picked up from the studio miniature (painted by the talented Brendan Roy) was the multitude of colors used on Padmé’s face that make her makeup look like skin and not a mask. Only the high points on the makeup are white, which is blended into a cool-tone pink mid-tone around the mouth and under the eyebrows. Then there are bits of flesh color along the hairline and the deepest shading at the sides of the cheeks and under the chin are a blue-tone gray. It did my best to replicate that placement. I love doing makeup on myself for fun and honestly I watch a lot of make-up tutorials to learn how to sculpt the face with shade and light. This has helped immensely with painting faces in general, but certainly with one like this where the character is heavily made up.

While there are always things to nitpick about my work on this miniature or to improve on, it was great to finish hobbying a miniature that I knew would challenge me and to feel good about the techniques I was able to practice while pulling it together.

If you’re looking for some guidance on how to paint Queen Padme Amidala, check out this video from Creative Director Dallas Kemp!