Paints Used

• "X-Wing Gray", the main color, is a custom mix someone posted to the Replica Prop Forum, consisting of:
  1/4 oz 36622
  1/2 oz Flat White
  1/8 oz 36495
  4 drops Insignia Yellow
  1 drop Aircraft Interior Black
• "Mustard Yellow":
  4 parts Vallejo Model Air "Gold Yellow" 078
  1 part Model Air "Dark Yellow" 71.025
• Red Markings: Vallejo
  Model Air "Fire Red" 71084
• Cannon yellow stripes:
  Model Air 71002 "Yellow"
• Droid: off-white body mixed in airbrush cup, no idea of ratio or what used, the head is 4 parts Vallejo Russian Green and 1 part Medium Olive. Cooper eye is Alclad metallic lacquer.

This is the 1/48th scale Fine Molds model. The molding and fit of the kit are excellent. It's actually a snap and screw together kit, but I ended up gluing everything. The only issue I ran into was that I, as a general rule, will assemble parts a half-dozen times to test fit before I apply glue, and with the tight tolerances in this model, I broke a few joints during the process. Nothing that glue wouldn't fix, though. I did need to clamp the upper and lower fuselage together to get rid of a minimum gap, but otherwise the fit was perfect.

The model is pretty much out of the box, with the exception of the cockpit, the markings, and the droid. In the cockpit I added bits of spare photo etch from 1/350th scale ship kits in a few places to dress up smooth boxes and surfaces, and I also made some conduit hoses out of guitar string. Simple enough, but it made a huge difference in the look. The droid head is an R5 from an after-market set that's long out of production. It's not entirely correct in that the head should be a trapezoid at the very top and blend down to the circular bottom, but I didn't want to modify such a nice looking detail. Since it wasn't completely correct, I painted the R5's eye copper, just because I love that color and so rarely have a chance to use it.

There are photos of the actor who played John Brannon on the internet, and I used those to do some minimal helmet markings. The red color and the white stripe wasn't difficult, but the scalloped detail on the front was too much to handle, so a single black dot made due, and I drew in the arrow shapes on the side of the helmet with a Sharpie.

The kit comes with markings for Skywalker's "Red-5", both in water transfer decals and regular peel-and-stick stickers for the kids, but the only decals I used were for the instrument panel in the cockpit; everything else is masked and airbrushed. I didn't want to do "Red 5", Luke Skywalker's ship, as you can't swing a wombat without hitting one of those things.

I photocopied the red wing markings and used them as templates to mask off for paint, simply omitting the outermost stripe to make "Red 4". The rest of the colors I arrived at by studying photos of other modelers' renditions of this ship. Photos exist of the filming miniature, but I can't make out anything from them. Most of the models built by others vary in the colors and placement, so I went with what looked to be the general consensus, and what I liked the best. Most painting was completed before assembly, due to the tight tolerances of the kit, seams were virtually nonexistent.

I did a lot of shading by first painting everything black and then letting that show through the color coats here and there. I also tried the hair spray technique for the first time: put on your base color, airbrush hair spray, then the next color. Once the top color is dry, you use a wet brush to scrub away at the surface, the hair spray begins to break down, and you get a cool chipped paint effect. Other weathering was done with pastels and pigments.

The Fine Molds kit was a joy to build and if it isn't the best designed, detailed, and fitting kit I've ever built... never mind. It is. It's great. A lot of purists have problems with the model as it isn't exactly true to the filming miniatures in certain details, and there are a couple of places that the modeler can enhance the final product by doing some research and adding things here and there (as I did with the cockpit), but overall you just can't beat this model. I'll be building more (as well as their 1/72nd scale X-Wing, Y-Wing, etc.)

~April 2013