If you're just now getting into Star Wars: Legion because of the Clone Wars release or if you've been playing it for a while, but are daunted by the prospect of painting over 50 battle droids, then this is the guide for you.
There's a common misconception among people who don't paint a lot/only paint individual models/have never painted before/etc. that you need a small brush and need to be very precise to achieve a good finished product. This is the brush I used for almost this entire project
Notice that brush is the size of the battle droid's torso. It's a tank brush, used for covering large surface areas quickly. There are very few things for this project that were not painted with this brush. Using these kinds of techniques is how you paint a lot of models quickly and the only real skill is knowing that they exist.
Premium Bases
For this project, we're going to use FFG's premium bases for two reasons, 1) it's faster than any other basing method (except just tossing flock or basing material down and calling it a day, but that looks like trash) and 2) it looks cool. Step 1, just prime all of them dark grey, super easy.
Step 2, just take a lighter grey and use that monster tank brush to go over them. For this step, I do more horizontal than vertical brush strokes to try and avoid getting paint in the recesses. I had to go over it twice to get a nice even coverage, but really wasn't careful at all about my brush strokes. One of the advantages of layers we're doing, is that a mess up on any individual layer doesn't really hurt you so you don't have to be precise or go back and fix mistakes.
Next step, I took a bone color and basically edged to bases. For this step, you need very little paint on the brush and you just kind of rub it across edges (since we have a lot of straight channels, we can just kind of drag the brush across those). Also, if you smear the paint somewhere you don't want it, just wipe it off with your fingers and keep going. It seems like you'd have to be super precise here, but you really don't.
I actually glossed over the part where I painted the metals (forgot to take another picture), but all that involved was briefly switching to a medium brush and just painting metallics on certain parts of the base, so nothing too special. The next step was 100% personal preference. I wanted to highlight the front arc of the Droideka bases a little more clearly and also add a way to differentiate units and the unit leader. I also wanted to paint this under the wash for aesthetic reasons. This was also some medium brush freehand work, but is completely optional.
Now, we dump some Aggrax Earthshade on the bases. The only real thing to remember here is that you want to keep pooling i.e. lots of the wash collecting in one place, to a minimum, so if it looks too thick, just spread it out some more or pick it up with the brush and start with the next base.
Now, this is another personal preference thing, but I like having some points of interest on the base, so I wanted to do some red glowy bits, switched to an actual small brush for this (not fine detail, just small). We also want to do the wash first so that it doesn't mess this up and so that we don't have to be careful with the wash. First step dark red in area we want to be glowy.
Second step, a thinner line of lighter red in the middle
Third step, add an even smaller line of orange in the middle and done with that part
Last step for the bases, black line the outside (also personal preference, I find it looks better)
Notice for this step I have them on the box to let them dry, try it and you'll see why. It might seem like there's a lot here, but there really isn't and you can blaze through it with a tank brush in no time (waiting for the wash to dry, took longer than the actual painting).
Thousands of Battle Droids
The great part about assembling the Battle Droids is that each part letter (A,B,C,D,E) represents a different pose and parts for the same pose are clustered together on the sprues. This means that you can just clip all of the parts and just set them in piles based on the pose to really streamline assembly. The arms are pretty terrible though, and they're basically three handed operations because you have to hold both arms in position next to the torso or just kind of guess how far apart the shoulders should be and glue the arms together off the torso. Either way, you're almost guaranteed to glue your fingers together at some point. However, the models are durable enough, that you can just throw them in a pile QED.
Step 1 is jut to prime them all in a bone color
Step 2, just wash them all with Aggrax Earthshade (using our friend Mr. Tank brush and avoiding pooling again). A few notes, I painted the yellow on the commander droids (head and the dot on the torso using a medium brush) before the wash, trust me it works better to have it under the wash. I also glued them to the bases when the wash dried.
The only thing left to do is to paint the guns black and then do a light drybrush of metallic on the guns. I also did some red glow on the missile launchers just for the hell of it. that's it, we're done.
They are no match for Droidekas! (walking mode only)
Usually, I'm not a fan of using sub-assemblies i.e. groups of parts painted desperately before being assembled. As a general rule, if it's something you can't reach with a brush, other people won't see that you painted it anyways. Droidekas were an exception because they have that weird skeletal frame. I split them up into torso/arms/legs which seems to be something FFG was thinking as well since the assembly instructions also have the models split into these sub assemblies.
The reason I'm not doing a complete tutorial for these is because I wanted to do color-shift paint for the carapace and that...made things more complex...to the point where if you don't know what you're doing already, I would advise messing around with a model you don't really care about. Airbrushing is about 1000% percent better than trying to do it with a brush, but it requires a black gloss primer and a gloss seal which the rest of the model doesn't use, so you probably have to do masking to prime key areas....yeah, it's not beginner tech, so if these are your first models, probably go with something easier.
The rest of the model was pretty straightforward, prime dark grey, drybrush metallic areas, wash the whole thing in Nuln Oil, then paint the eyes using the red glow technique previously discussed. Then figure out what you want to do for the carapce, assemble and you're done.
Grievous
I opted out of full tutorial for Grievous because it would be time consuming to take pics at all the steps, a lot of it was just stuff that has already been covered and also Grievous has three different poses and not all of this applies to all three. We will go through some of the basics, however.
Grievous started the same way the battle droids did i.e. bone primer with one exception, I kept the cloak separate because it has a texture pattern that's supposed to be red on the underside and I didn't want to do that behind Grievous. This also required me to keep the head separate.
The cloak was primed dark grey and the limbs were painted dark grey in key areas (use a reference pic for what areas). the cloak was highlighted with a really light drybrush of light grey, then I brushed some Nuln Oil in the recessed areas. The limbs were done just like the limbs on the droidekas (metallic drybrush and nuln oil). There's also some extra highlighting on the bone.
Lightsabers are trash to paint. Just find something you can do that doesn't look like hot garbage and go for it. You're basically trying to paint a 3d effect on a 2d surface so it will always look weird from at least one angle. There are entire tutorials on how to do good lightsabers and it's outside the general range of this as a beginner tutorial but if you really want to test your skills, go check some of them out.
Impossibly Outnumbered
Hope this was helpful in letting people realize how easy tabletop quality can really be!