From Print Bed to Delta Quadrant: Painting the Voyager Crew

A little while ago, I posted about my attempts to turn Drakonius’ excellent Star Trek: Voyager models into gaming-scale miniatures using my Bambu Lab A1 Mini. At the time they were still very much inhabitants of the grey plastic universe, but I’m pleased to say that has now changed.

The crew of the USS Voyager are finally painted!

As I mentioned in the original post, these models weren’t really designed with miniature gaming in mind. The originals are large display pieces, around 18 to 20 centimetres tall, so reducing them all the way down to roughly 28mm/32mm territory was always going to involve a few compromises.

Despite that, I was really pleased with the prints. The natural poses survived the reduction particularly well, and there was still enough recognisable detail to make the individual members of the crew immediately identifiable. Of course, printing them was only half the challenge. The next job was getting some paint onto them.

Painting FDM miniatures presents its own set of problems. At this scale you simply don’t get the perfectly smooth surfaces and extremely fine detail that you might expect from resin. Layer lines are still present if you look closely enough, and some details inevitably become softer during the scaling process. The trick, I’ve found, is not to fight those limitations too much.

Janeway & Chakotay

Instead, I concentrated on getting the important things right: the familiar Voyager uniform colours, the faces, hair and the little differences that help distinguish one character from another. At tabletop distance, those elements matter far more than whether every tiny detail is perfectly reproduced.

Paris & Torres

They were also an interesting group to paint because there’s relatively little variation in the uniforms. That means the faces, hairstyles and poses have to do much of the work in establishing who is who. Fortunately, Drakonius captured the characters well enough that the likenesses still come through despite the dramatic reduction in scale.

Tuvok, Kin & The EMH

And, perhaps most importantly, they're no longer grey!

A pair of 7's

Looking at the finished crew together, I’m really pleased with the experiment. They’re never going to compete with high-resolution resin prints for microscopic detail, but that wasn’t really the point. I wanted a recognisable, usable set of Voyager miniatures that would sit comfortably alongside the rest of my collection, and I think they achieve that remarkably well.

Kes & Neelix

Now I suppose I need to find something for them to do...