Bandai Millennium Falcon Vehicle Model 006 - Daniel B

Well, I started painting the 1:350 Falcon tonight. Being such small scale, your paint coats have to be flawless.

First, I wanted to start with a black primer, for reasons I'll mention here soon. I sprayed Mr Surfacer 1500 thinned 1.5 : 1 thinner/primer with Mr. Leveling Thinner. This sprayed absolutely beautifully and laid down a smooth primer coat. If you don't have Mr Surfacer 1500, black Stynylrez is also a fantastic choice.

While I probably could have just left the primer as is, JUST to be sure, I gently polished the Falcon's primer coat with a soft toothbrush and toothpaste. This now left an ultra satin smooth finish for paint.




I chose to paint the Falcon Mr. Color 107 Character White. It's a very very light grey, not exactly white, and also semi-gloss. I chose to do a semi-gloss basecoat, because even at this scale, some flat paints may produce too much graininess, even with a flawless application. If you don't have a semi-gloss grey and are using Tamiya paints, you can mix their flat paints 50/50 with Tamiya X-22 clear to get semi gloss. If you're using Vallejo, you can add gloss medium in the same way. I thinned the paint 1:1 again with Mr. Leveling Thinner. This is where the black primer coat really does it's work. Because white has a poorer opaqueness than black, not all of the white pigment can get into every nook and cranny. This allows some shading in the crevices and is much better than a heavy handed black wash. I personally hate all but the most subtle of washes on a model, it ruins realism.

Lastly, I also polished the cured basecoat with toothpaste again to make sure it was absolutely flawless. Once all weathering is applied, the semi-gloss basecoat will probably get knocked back down to the flat hunk of junk we love.

How long does the minty fresh odour remain?

nkg said:

How long does the minty fresh odour remain?

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I rinse the toothpaste off with water. Then I wash the piece with dish soap and the same soft toothbrush just to make sure there's no residue. No odor after that.

Well, I wasn't 100% happy with the first paint job on closer inspection, so I started over. Usually I spray lacquer paints, but I figured I'd use the redo as a test bed for doing the entire model full acrylics, primer, basecoat, panels, and weathering. We'll see how it goes.


So to start off, I striped down back to plastic with isopropyl alcohol alcohol, and then primed with black Stynylrez, then painted the basecoat with Vallejo Model Air White Grey. I must say I was very impressed with this combo. Really smooth.


Next I used Vallejo Model Color Flat Red and Dark Red mixed 50/50 to pic out the red panels with brush painting. I mixed this 1:1 with Vallejo Airbrush Thinner to avoid brush strokes. This mixture is then very self leveling. I did the same also for the yellow panels by mixing Vallejo Flat Yellow and Sky Grey 50/50. Again thinned with Vallejo Airbrush Thinner. Then I touched up my work by brushing on the original White Grey color where I had accidentally gone outside the lines.

DanielB said:

Well, I wasn't 100% happy with the first paint job on closer inspection, so I started over. Usually I spray lacquer paints, but I figured I'd use the redo as a test bed for doing the entire model full acrylics, primer, basecoat, panels, and weathering. We'll see how it goes.


So to start off, I striped down back to plastic with isopropyl alcohol alcohol, and then primed with black Stynylrez, then painted the basecoat with Vallejo Model Air White Grey. I must say I was very impressed with this combo. Really smooth.


Next I used Vallejo Model Color Flat Red and Dark Red mixed 50/50 to pic out the red panels with brush painting. I mixed this 1:1 with Vallejo Airbrush Thinner to avoid brush strokes. This mixture is then very self leveling. I did the same also for the yellow panels by mixing Vallejo Flat Yellow and Sky Grey 50/50. Again thinned with Vallejo Airbrush Thinner. Then I touched up my work by brushing on the original White Grey color where I had accidentally gone outside the lines.


http://i.imgur.com/sPq4Bi8.jpg

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Bandai vehicle model falcon is based on the 5-foot studio model (3 landing gear) and I noticed its underside is slightly different from 5 landing gear model (esp.red panels)

sailormoon said:

Bandai vehicle model falcon is based on the 5-foot studio model (3 landing gear) and I noticed its underside is slightly different from 5 landing gear model (esp.red panels)
View attachment 700471

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Oh, thank you. It's so hard to find reference of the bottom. I really appreciate it.

Looking good so far.

I recently tried out some Vallejo paints through the airbrush and was pretty impressed. I had previously only ever used Tamiya

I used the Vallejo thinner (although I found I needed to mix more in than recommended).

I was horrified at first when the coat looked kind of grainy and glob like. I thought I had ruined it, but then it wound up drying extremely smooth instead of grainy. I like that is is water based acrylic over the Tamiya laquer. Not a big fan of the fumes

blakeh1 said:

Looking good so far.

I recently tried out some Vallejo paints through the airbrush and was pretty impressed. I had previously only ever used Tamiya

I used the Vallejo thinner (although I found I needed to mix more in than recommended).

I was horrified at first when the coat looked kind of grainy and glob like. I thought I had ruined it, but then it wound up drying extremely smooth instead of grainy. I like that is is water based acrylic over the Tamiya laquer. Not a big fan of the fumes

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This video is a very good how to on spraying Vallejo Model Air.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNU55qMSRP0

This video, while Ammo instead of Vallejo, still is very good at showing how to properly spray acrylic paints vs lacquer based ones, and why you can't do it the same way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZHAqxSHHvc

First pass of weathering complete. I gotta build this up in SUBTLE layers. Something this small is really easy to go too far. This shows also why I always spray a neutral gray as the basecoat on Falcon builds. The weathering always "warms" up the surface by making it tan-ish.