Star Wars Legion - Crashed X wing part 1

This crashed X wing does not belong to me but is one of the benefits of commission painting that such things as I would be unlikely to buy has passed across my desk for painting. I have treated it as a centrepiece rather then just a terrain piece and in two artiles will show how I went about painting both the Xwing and the terrain bases.

Step 1

As usual evrything gets primed in black and left a day for the primer to really harden. Bases and bits.

First pass for the white is going to be Deck tan. This is a decent solid base which is a bit warmer than grey but you could just as easily use a light grey as most of this will end up just as a shadow colour anyway.

Here is the deck tan in [lace with some slight Variation in the panels but not a great deal. At this point I am covering everything as I had no real idea where the blue and grey panels were going to go. The illustration on the box is not that clear so I just did everywhere. You can see how not white Deck tan is as i had already moved on to Ivory on the little panels on the engine before remembering I needed to take a photo.

Next up is Ivory, another of the warmer white colours and again if you want a whitey blue white you can go with a white/light grey mix here but I wanted a sort of warmer white as the bacground terrain is going to be snow so cold white on cold white might not stand out enough. On say a Dagobar background whitey white would be great. The piece of card is my high tech guide for doing panel modulation . It masks off the area i am going to spray light from those which are to remain darker

Modulation developing on the panels as we go along keeping between the lines using the piece of thin card

Top highlight was just white and sprayed along the upper parts of panels using the card to stop spray over onto other panels. On tanks you can be more dramatic with the effect as usually you can use washes/glazes to bring it back to a more normal effect but that isnt really an option over white.

Tamiya masking tape time. Before masking I always spray matt varnish and leave it to dry properly. I have had paintwork peel off in the past when the tape is removed and the horror of that makes me do extra layers of varnish. I have no idea if this works but it makes me feel better.

As mentioned the box art does ot show where these panels start or end so it was a bit of 'rule of cool' going on here.

Again panels were basically base layered blue then highlighted up until they looked decent without being too fantasy. None of this is anything that takes a lot of skill and anyone with an airbrush and patience could do it.

The same process exactly was followed for the grey panels starting with a mid grey I think was called Sea grey (?) and then lightened up with white. I also decided to do the cockpit glass at this point and wanted a sort of snowy sky look being reflected rather than the blue sky I normally do. Base was black then greys sprayed randomly and a bit of violet mixed in for the slightly mauve grey you see sometimes in heavy snow clouds.

Tape all removed with no damage. Huzzah!

Now time for another varnish to both protect the fragile thin airbrush layers and as a basis for the fun part. Gloss varnish here. A couple of coats and left overnight to be a slippy base for the oil paint panel lining.

Using really thinned down oil paints for panel lining is really fun IF you get the consistency correct. It has to be thinned more than you think and you need a brush with a decent point and a big belly. If you have these then its all down to capillary action. Touch the loaded brush into the groove and watch it run. I never get bored of watching liquid run uphill as it does using this technique. Obviously it runs better downhill so hold your piece to enable that but watch in awe as some runs upwards!

The just as cool thing here is that the little patches you can see in the picture below were the brush touched the surface and left small grey smudges. They can be cleaned off with zero trouble once everything is dried in a couple of hours. It is best to leave it to dry before cleaning to avoid accidentally smudging the still liquid panel lines.

You can also run the panel liner oils around parts like the tubes on the engine in the picture below and be confident that once dried any excess can be cleaned easily with a small brush damped in thinner. DO NOT use a brush loaded with thinner as it will reactivate everything. Dip in your thinner and dry off on kitchen towel. Enough will remain in the damp brush to do the job. See the same wing section below after cleaning.

Chipping and scratching is next. I used a piece of ripped up sponge in the traditional technique along the broken edges to get random damage of all sizes and also smaller chips randomly across the whole surface. It is easy to do too much here and to be honest I have no idea how much chipping happens in space so I went quite light. There are umpteen scratch and score marks on the actual model so it was just a matter of using a fine pointed brush to fill these in starting slightly wider on the damage edge and tapering out. Below you can see the general effect and later I would return to add a thinner aluminium coloured line in the deepest part of about a third of the lines to represent the deepest scores.

More weathering was added using enamels to represent the mud/soil of the planet where it came into contact with the wreck. On a tank there would be a lot more of this but I did not want to do too much and lose the essential whiteness. I did apply more of the 'Streaking grime' enamel and earth pigment originally but it was too much and once again it was easy to clean off the 'excess' over the gloss varnish.

The enging on the back was next. I did not want mud in here as I assume there was perhaps some panel covering before the crash or at least it was far enough from the impact. As such i just drybrushed gunmetal then aluminium over black

To add a bit off interest I popped some enamel oul effect in a couple of areas to suggest oil leaks from impact. You can just about see the brown ish effect about a quarter of the way down the engine and again to the left of the circle shape near the bottom. As the X wing is tilted slightly to one side the oil effect is also just on that side as if pooled there.

The cockpit was finishe up with the same low vis grey around the glass and edge highlighted with a lighter grey. Tiny white dots were popped in the corners of the panels on the top and one side which makes it look more like glass for some reason. I was going to leave the glass in gloss varnish but in the end just covered everything with a couple of coats of matt varnish. I might come back to the glass later but am in two minds about the finish!

And that is the X wing finished (except perhaps the glass) and ready to be placed on its snowy Hoth type base which I will cover in part two. As I said earlier none of this is terribly difficult and I feel anyone with an airbrush and the time to learn how to use it could produce the same or better work.