{"id":11170,"date":"2026-05-04T06:36:26","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T11:36:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devinjpoore.com\/?page_id=11170"},"modified":"2026-05-04T06:44:24","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T11:44:24","slug":"b-wing-joe-johnston-concept-1-72nd-scale","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/devinjpoore.com\/?page_id=11170","title":{"rendered":"B-Wing, Joe Johnston Concept, 1\/72nd Scale"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Every year at Wonderfest there’s a “challenge” build, where a theme is decided and everyone builds something based upon said theme. Several years back the challenge was to make something based upon Joe Johnston’s sketches. Being a B-Wing nerd, I picked his concept B-Wing drawings. They all varied in certain details, which is what concept drawings are for, so I picked what I liked from each sketch, and made my model based on that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When I first started, the idea was to do this mostly by hand: carve wing, fuselage, and cockpit out of solid resin the like, then skin it in styrene and plant greeblies. As the build progressed, and I missed the initial deadline due to a bit of a respiratory infection and other things, 3D printer technology jumped in leaps and bounds, so that when I was ready to return to the build, I scrapped all of the work I’d done previously and went all-in on CAD design and printing.<\/p>\n\n\n

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I work in Rhinoceros, a software that I started playing with a long time ago, and that I’ve used daily at my day-jobs for over ten years now. For the main components, I dropped the sketches into the software and drew over them to get the basic shapes of the wings, cockpit, and engine housing. It was then a matter of making them all fit together, and then detailing. The main sticking point was the cockpit. On the screen-used B-Wing, the entire cockpit module rotates, but with the cockpit shapes in the sketches, that wasn’t going to work. I ended up tweaking the design so that the front, with the canopy framing, pilot seat, and instrument panels, are a separate module, which rotates within the rest of the cockpit housing. I was going to put a rod with ball bearings in there initially so that it could spin, but at this scale that was a bit much, so I instead attached the assembly with magnets, so that one can reposition it (something that I’ve maybe done twice).<\/p>\n\n\n

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The detail inside the cockpit didn’t exist in any of the sketches, so I made it up. I went with a “floating” design, with the pilot’s seat and instrument panels sticking out and hanging over nothingness, based upon the design of another favorite Star Wars ship, the U-Wing. For the pilot I took an F-1 driver head and stuck it on an X-Wing pilot body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I added a sprinkling of 3D greeblies, a few I found online, a few I drew myself, placing them here and there after I’d finished the main structures and the panel lines. I printed everything in an “industrial strength” resin. The detail of the prints was great, but there were some layer lines on the large flat expanses, which required a bit of sanding to smooth everything out.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Once the major sub-assemblies were built, I hit everything with gray primer, then the panel lines and areas in shadow with black. Over that I shot flat white – the overall color – through splotchy masks. Normally that’s done with a dark paint, but I wanted to try it the other way around. Once the splotches dried, then the same color was thinly sprayed over it until the splotches nearly disappear. This visually breaks up a single color monotone surface. I kept the markings simple, as there really aren’t any called out in any of the sketches, but the B-Wing looked too plain without them. I kind of wish I had taken the blue of the stripes and canopy frames back from the cockpit, to give it a little more color and visual interest in that area. Weathering was kept to a minimum, to keep the clean sketch look; I did very minimal streaking, and highlighted all of the panel lines with extremely thin oil paints and a double-ought paint brush.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Brass telescoping rod from Albion make up the various cannons. I drew and laser-cut the display base, and mounted the model on a carbon fiber rod. The eagle-eyed will notice that I asked Bill George sign the base for me, as he built the screen-used B-Wings for “Return of the Jedi<\/em>“.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is one of my favorite projects. It was the first time I did a truly start-to-finish scratch-build project outside of my day job, and I’m extremely happy with the result. I took it to the Scale Model Challenge show in 2024 and received a bronze medal; it’s truly amazing to be recognized at what’s considered one of the premiere scale model shows in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paints<\/strong>:
-Mr Surfacer 1200 gray primer base
-Tamiya XF-2 White base. This was initially applied through a splotch-mask, then highly thinned white applied over that so just a bare grey splotch showed through.
-Blue markings: Tamiya XF-18 medium blue
-Gray “mechanicals”: Tamiya XF-54 dark sea grey, with a glaze of black gray (?) over that
-XF-19 Sky Grey added to white, very very little, for mist-over coat to break up starkness of white.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Model completed in June of 2023<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n