Archive&Future
Sr Member
This won't be a particularly fancy thread, I'm not doing any amazing build modifications, in fact this will be pretty much 2 OOB X-Wings with custom bases but hey....it's not often we see a 1:72 Red 3 is it?
Assembly was pretty tedious but it only took a couple of hours
Now this is the bit where it departs sliiiightly from the norm of X-Wing paint jobs, but only in technique and not finish. I find that a lot of modellers are quite dogmatic about the 'correct' way to paint an X-Wing (here's looking at you SS builders
) I decided to hell with all that and went for my own methodology.
I primed all the pieces bar the engine thrusters in Tamiya X-11 'Medium Grey', which is a very good 'Star Wars' kind of base to work from. I preshaded significant areas with a 1:2 mix of X-11 'Medium Grey' and X-1 'Black', then panel lines and parts that needed to stand out were drawn into with a waterproof pigment brush marker. The effect is a bit TRON-like
The next stage was to sponge a very specific mixture onto the surfaces, made from 1 part odourless brush cleaner to 3 parts acrylic paint. The inclusion of brush thinner is key, as it acts to mottle the paintwork and dissolve the pigment marker, blending the lines in further. The use of thinner has to be extremely sparing with this technique, or else all of the paint will be stripped. And don't use a strong solvent thinner....you don't want to melt your plastic, I was sensible enough to use one strong enough only for fresh paint
I laid 3 very thin coats of Tamiya XF-2 'Flat White', note the word thin. The nice thing about having a grungy surface underneath is that you can control the effect on the topcoat layer, however you have to be very careful to not block out the effect and just paint over it. Ya want all that grime to show through.
Now you could just leave the paint at this point at it would turn out as a very respectable model, however I felt the colouration needed to be shifted from brown to slightly more blue, so I used a dark blue ink wash over everything and then repeated the previous steps with the white dusting.
The difference between the tints is ultra minimal, but I'm sure most of us know how every layer changes things in subtle ways.
Next step will be to paint the individual markings of Red 5 and 3, as I dislike Finemolds' thick decals
Assembly was pretty tedious but it only took a couple of hours
Now this is the bit where it departs sliiiightly from the norm of X-Wing paint jobs, but only in technique and not finish. I find that a lot of modellers are quite dogmatic about the 'correct' way to paint an X-Wing (here's looking at you SS builders
) I decided to hell with all that and went for my own methodology.
I primed all the pieces bar the engine thrusters in Tamiya X-11 'Medium Grey', which is a very good 'Star Wars' kind of base to work from. I preshaded significant areas with a 1:2 mix of X-11 'Medium Grey' and X-1 'Black', then panel lines and parts that needed to stand out were drawn into with a waterproof pigment brush marker. The effect is a bit TRON-like
The next stage was to sponge a very specific mixture onto the surfaces, made from 1 part odourless brush cleaner to 3 parts acrylic paint. The inclusion of brush thinner is key, as it acts to mottle the paintwork and dissolve the pigment marker, blending the lines in further. The use of thinner has to be extremely sparing with this technique, or else all of the paint will be stripped. And don't use a strong solvent thinner....you don't want to melt your plastic, I was sensible enough to use one strong enough only for fresh paint
I laid 3 very thin coats of Tamiya XF-2 'Flat White', note the word thin. The nice thing about having a grungy surface underneath is that you can control the effect on the topcoat layer, however you have to be very careful to not block out the effect and just paint over it. Ya want all that grime to show through.
Now you could just leave the paint at this point at it would turn out as a very respectable model, however I felt the colouration needed to be shifted from brown to slightly more blue, so I used a dark blue ink wash over everything and then repeated the previous steps with the white dusting.
The difference between the tints is ultra minimal, but I'm sure most of us know how every layer changes things in subtle ways.
Next step will be to paint the individual markings of Red 5 and 3, as I dislike Finemolds' thick decals
