Star Wars Shatterpoint Paints - Character Schemes & the Pots to Buy

Shatterpoint is not an army game, and that changes the whole shopping list. A strike team is eight or nine models, they are all named people, and they stand a good head taller than a 28mm trooper. Nobody batch-paints forty identical torsos here. You paint a squad of four, you finish it, and it is a third of your force.

That is worth saying plainly because most Star Wars painting advice is written for the other game. If you are painting rank-and-file corps units by the tray, the throughput techniques in our Star Wars Legion paint guide are the right ones. If you are painting Ahsoka's face, or four Mandalorians who all wear different plate colours, you want the recipes below: fewer models, more decisions per model, and a palette built around white armour, skin, and one accent colour that identifies the unit.

Every pot named on this page carries its current price from every shop we track, so you can price a scheme before you commit to it. Nothing here needs an out-of-print faction paint set.

Start with the white, because everything else is easier

Almost every Republic-era squad in the game is white armour with coloured markings, and white is the hardest basecoat in miniature painting - the makers know it, which is why Atomic Mass Games has run "how to paint white" as a taught class at conventions rather than a footnote. Get it right once and clones, Mandalorian scouts, snowtroopers and half the Imperial range fall out of the same method.

Community recipes split into two camps, and they genuinely disagree.

The grey route. Prime grey rather than white, then let a thin white shade do the shading for you: Grey Seer primer, an all-over coat of Apothecary White, then White Scar pulled across raised panels. The variant published by The Painting Pirate mixes the base instead - roughly equal parts Administratum Grey and a titanium white - shades with Apothecary White, and highlights White Scar. This gives cool, slightly blue-shadowed armour that reads as screen-accurate under table lighting.

The white route. Prime white and never paint white again. Scar Hand Painting's clone tutorial does exactly this: white primer is the armour, and only the recesses, bodyglove and markings get paint. It is dramatically faster over four or five models and the trade-off is honest - you lose control of where the shadow lands, and a missed spot on a white model shows more than on any other colour. A pale contrast or a light grey layer gives you the middle ground.

Our read, having painted both: at Shatterpoint's size the grey route wins, because these models are big enough that flat white looks unfinished from a foot away. On a corps unit of seven, the white route wins on time. That is the difference between the two games in one paragraph.

Whichever you pick, keep the bodyglove dark and cool rather than black - a very dark neutral like Corvus Black or a black contrast over grey reads as fabric instead of a hole. Chipping is optional and very effective on veteran clones: a sponge, a mid grey, and restraint.

The markings are the character

A clone in plain white is a clone. A clone with blue flashes is 501st, and Shatterpoint sells its squads on exactly that recognition. Because you are painting four models rather than forty, you can afford to do the markings properly - masked or carefully edged rather than dabbed.

The consensus colours, and the ones community guides agree on most often:

• 501st (Rex, Anakin's legion) - deep blue. Kantor Blue is the widely repeated choice, edge-highlighted up to White Scar. Macragge Blue is the brighter reading if you want the markings to pop at arm's length.
• 212th (Cody, Kenobi) - orange. A mid orange over the white, not a yellow-orange; Troll Slayer Orange is close to the screen tone.
• 104th Wolfpack (Plo Koon) - grey. The trap here is contrast: grey markings on white armour need a cooler and darker grey than you think, or they vanish.
• Coruscant Guard - red. A dark, slightly brown red like Mephiston Red sits better against white than a bright scarlet.

Want the full recipe rather than a single pot? Feed the marking colour to the scheme generator and it returns a shade, layer and highlight across brands - handy when your local shop is out of the exact pot.

The commando problem: four colours in one squad

Republic commandos are the one place Shatterpoint asks you to paint four different schemes in a single box, because each member wears his own colour over the same armour. It is genuinely fiddly, and the fix is sequencing rather than skill: paint all four models' white armour together, then split them for the accent pass so you only load one accent colour at a time. Do not try to finish one model before starting the next.

Atomic Mass Games publishes 360-degree turnaround photography of each miniature on its own product gallery, which is the only reliable way to see where a given commando's markings actually sit - the reference is worth having open while you paint.

Faces, at a scale where faces show

This is the real difference from painting an army. Shatterpoint characters are recognisable people with sculpted expressions, and a face is the first thing anyone looks at. At this size a three-step face - base, recess wash, one highlight on nose, brow and cheekbone - is enough to carry the model, and the fourth step is a controlled wet blend if you want it.

A mid-tone flesh base with a warm wash covers most of the human cast. Go slightly darker and browner for Rex under the helmet, slightly cooler and paler for the Imperial officers.

Togruta skin (Ahsoka) is orange-red, not orange. Two published approaches, both corroborated by several painters: base with a brown-orange and highlight up through a mid orange to a pale orange; or base a burnt orange and highlight by mixing a pure orange into it, which keeps the whole face in one family and avoids a chalky top note. The white facial markings are sculpted, so they can be filled with a pure white and left alone - resist the urge to highlight them further.

Nightsister skin is a grey-white, and it is the hardest skin in the game. Painters converge on mixing the palest flesh tone you own with an off-white, then washing it with a split wash - part flesh wash, part violet - so the shadows go cold while the raised areas stay warm. Sources warn against drybrushing it: it goes chalky immediately, and a heavily thinned pale grey glaze is the fix.

Robes, cloaks and the Sith black problem

Jedi cloth is brown, cream and a lot of it, which is a gift: large soft areas take a wash-and-highlight treatment beautifully and need no edge work. Base the robe a mid brown, shade the folds, then highlight the ridges a bone or cream shade. The reason it looks good on these models specifically is drape - the sculpts have real cloth volume, so shading follows the folds and does the work for you.

Sith and Imperial black is the opposite trap. Never paint black black. Base a very dark neutral or a blue-black, shade the recesses proper black, then highlight the panel edges up to a cool mid grey. Vader and Ventress read as black at a table's distance and still show their shapes at arm's length; painted flat black they become silhouettes.

Beskar, and the Mandalorians who wear it

Mandalorian squads are the most colourful models in the game and the fastest to make look expensive, because armour plate is the one surface where metallics do most of the work. Two routes again:

• True metallic. A dark steel base, an all-over dark wash, then a bright silver drybrushed or edged on the plate rims. This is the honest beskar look and it takes about twenty minutes a model.
• Coloured plate over metal. Super Commandos and Sabine's crew wear painted plates - reds, blues, yellows - over metal trim. A red contrast or speedpaint over white primer gives the saturated, slightly translucent finish those plates have on screen, and Scar Hand Painting's Super Commando tutorial does exactly this before highlighting the raised edges with a pale flesh-orange.

Weathering is where Mandalorians beat clones: these are people who work. A sponge chip on the plate edges, a rust-brown streak below a jetpack vent, and a dark pigment in the recesses is entirely in character - and the same three steps look wrong on a parade-fresh 501st trooper.

Droids: tan plastic, not metal

B1 battle droids are the cheapest painting win in the game and the one most people get wrong by reaching for a metallic. They are dirty tan-cream plastic, panel-lined by grime rather than shaded by light.

The two documented methods differ in where the colour comes from. One primes white and drops a single thick coat of a honey-yellow contrast over the whole model, which shades and colours in one pass. The other bases a dust-tan and then washes it with a thinned pinkish-brown flesh contrast, which keeps a warmer, browner droid than the honey route. They give visibly different droids - the honey route is yellower and glossier, the dust route is browner and more matt - so pick by which battle droids you have in your head, and stay consistent across the squad.

Either way: pick out the photoreceptors dark, put a thin dark line in every panel gap, and stop. Twelve B1s finished at a decent standard beat four immaculate ones.

Lightsabers and glow

Every Shatterpoint force has at least one lit blade, and this is the one place where the hero scale genuinely earns extra effort. The blade itself is straightforward: base the saber colour, then work the centre of the blade towards white so the core is brightest and the edge stays coloured. A fluorescent paint over the core is the cheat that photographs best.

Object source lighting - actually painting the light the blade casts onto the face, hands and nearby armour - is where painters disagree, and reasonably. Published methods drybrush a darker version of the saber colour over the lit area, then a smaller pass of the blade colour inside it, or glaze the same colour on with heavily thinned contrast paint. Both work. Whether to do it at all is a taste call: OSL on a game piece can look striking on a shelf and slightly odd on a table under a different light. If you are unsure, do it on your primary character only, where the model is the centrepiece of a squad rather than one of four.

Bases, and the terrain nobody warns you about

Shatterpoint plays on tall, three-dimensional boards, and the game ships more scenery per box than any comparable skirmish game. That has two consequences for your paint shopping.

First, bases should match the boards you play on rather than the character - a grey urban concrete or a pale dust does for almost everything, and the basing guide covers the texture side. Second, you will end up painting terrain in quantity, and terrain wants cheap, large-volume paint rather than a hobby pot: a grey base coat, a dry dust colour over it, and a wash in the recesses. A drybrush pass does 80% of the work on moulded concrete.

The shortest list that paints a whole squad

If you want to walk into a shop once and come out able to finish a squad box, this is the list. Six pots plus a primer, and every one of them gets used again on the next squad.

1. Grey primer - the base for white armour and for terrain.
2. A pale white shade - Apothecary White or equivalent; the single most useful pot for this game.
3. A pure white - markings, blade cores, highlights.
4. Your unit's accent colour - the blue, orange, red or grey that names the squad.
5. A dark steel - weapons on every model in the box.
6. A mid flesh tone and a warm wash - faces, and the wash doubles as your panel liner.

Ranges are interchangeable here: if your shop stocks one brand and not another, the paint matcher finds the nearest pot in every range we hold, and the Vallejo, Citadel and Army Painter hubs list the full ranges with prices side by side.

Tips

• Paint the squad, not the model. Four models through one stage at a time is faster and more consistent than one finished model at a time - and consistency is what makes a strike team look like a strike team.
• White armour first, markings second, never the reverse. Correcting white over a colour costs three coats.
• Contrast between marking and armour matters more than accuracy. A marking colour that is right on screen and invisible on the table is the wrong colour for a game piece.
• Give the primary character one extra hour. In a game of named heroes, the model that leads your force is the one people look at.
• Use the official turnaround photos. The publisher's product gallery shows where each marking sits; guessing from memory is how a 212th trooper ends up wearing 501st blue.
• Do not black-line a white model with black. A dark grey or a brown wash in the recesses keeps the armour looking like armour.

Painting a different game? The same scheme-to-pots treatment exists for Star Wars: Legion, Lord of the Rings and BattleTech.