I find the out-of-the-box paint jobs on the ships in the X-Wing Miniatures game to be really nice for pre-painted miniatures. You can buy them straight of the shelf and put them into play on the table-top to create great looking dogfight scenes (not to mention that the game plays as good as it looks too). There's no immediate need to re-paint the ships, and most people would never even consider it. But, when it comes to miniatures, I'm not most people. I couldn't help but think about how to make my ships stand out from the crowd.
I confess, I consider myself somewhat of a Star Wars geek, but within the context of the original trilogy films. I grew up with them, and they shaped much of who I am. I would even attribute my love for building and painting miniatures to my early desires to know how the team at Industrial Light and Magic created those groundbreaking effects. This is back when they had to physically build the sets and rig pyrotechnics as they dollied a rolling camera through the scene. I used to devour every bit of behind the scenes coverage that I could find and would try to make my models and dioramas at home look just as professional.
However, outside of the original Star Wars trilogy films, I am not much of a Star Wars buff. I have not read the many novels that expand the Star Wars universe. I know that I don a glazed over, deer in the headlights appearance when I'm playing a game of X-Wing and someone comes up and wants to talk about how Han Solo knew Soontir Fel at the Imperial Academy. I am a little surprised at myself then that I've been reading, and enjoying, the Star Wars comic series from Dark Horse that was rebooted at the start of 2013. In the second issue (In the Shadow of Yavin, Part 2), when Leia assembles a
stealth squadron of elite pilots, later identified as Gray Flight, and outfits them with new, gray x-wings, I immediately knew the paint scheme that was destined for my table-top x-wings. Today, I completed re-painting x-wings to match Luke Skywalker's and Wedge Antilles' ships in this stealth squadron.
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| Stealth Squadron: Luke (left) and Wedge (right) |
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| The Front of Wedge's X-Wing |
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| The Rear of Luke's X-Wing |
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| My Stealth Re-Paints Alongside a Stock, Pre-Painted X-Wing |
Those are really nice. I like the comic they are based on too.
ReplyDeleteReally nice paint job, Crisp in all the right places.
ReplyDeleteGotta ask however, when you painted these guys, did you just 'Go over the top' with your paint job or did you strip the models down back to the plastic/Resin and go with a fresh coat of paint from the base coat up?
And if you did Strip the X-Wings, what method did you use?
Thanks. I did not strip them before repainting. I've seen mention of people doing that, but I've also seen some disastrous results with people using certain solvents so I didn't want to chance ruining the model. For any X-Wing repaints I've done, I just paint 'over the top' of the factory paint making sure to use thinned down paints so as to retain as much of the model detail as possible.
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