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Stellar Envoy (AKA Millennium Falcon) I've had Bandai's little box scale Falcon sitting about in a base coat for a while, and since I was waiting for some filler to dry on the Gigant, I decided to get some more work done on it. I wasn't originally planning to do a wip for it, so I don't have any construction pics, but there's not really much to these vehicle model kits, and this is built OOB anyway. I have taken some photos of the painting steps though, so I thought I might as well post them. As the title implies, this is being done as the Stellar Envoy which, if you don't know the Star Wars EU that well, was the Millennium Falcon in a previous life, before Lando acquired it and then lost it to Han. The main difference between the Stellar Envoy and the Falcon we all know and love, is the blue deco over the hull, and that's going to form the bulk of the paintwork I'll have to do. To begin with, the whole ship was base coated in a pale warm grey I then spent this morning painting in some random panels in various warm and cool grey shades, using thinned acrylics and some washes. These aren't matched to the Falcon's panels, or even to the few reference images of the Envoy. It's just going to be my take on the ship Tonight was spent masking up and painting the first of the blue markings. I've started with the curved sections, as they're the trickiest to do. The masking for the edges of the curves were cut with a compass cutter, then the rest of the area covered with silly putty. While the blue paint was still a bit soft, I made a few scratches in it to give it a more weathered look I'll be fitting the work on this around the Gigant, so I'll probably be switching back and forth between the two over the next few days. Andy

I present my recently completed Bandai box scale(1/144) X-wing from some rather obscure movie franchise or other. I decided not to go with the more familiar rebel/red 5 out of the box scheme as the kit markings are supplied as stickers(not waterslide decals!! ) The colour scheme depicted is my take on the partisan x-wing which featured briefly Rogue One. The kit was finished in a selection of Tamiya/Mr.Color paints that I had to hand and some PITA masking due to the small size of the kit.

Finally managed to get my Gonk Droid to a stage where I am happy with him (had a slight nightmare during build that is covered in my build thread, but also a very luck recovery). He still needs a proper display base where he can be with BB8, but for now I'm calling the done. thanks for looking, Leigh

A quick fun weekend build from John & Helen - first appearing on the big screens 40 years ago, here's the J&H Death Star. £30 from Ebay, its not a bad kit - Helen loved getting busy with the Tamiya masking tapes, and then the tweezers and scalpel to remove the masking, having left me to use Black, grey and white Halfords primer rattle cans to bring this very old kit back to life. I will add, this was Helen's first venture in model building - she seemed to enjoy it and was keen to keep working on the kit across the weekend - it was built her way without my influence and I would say she's done quite good for a beginner with minimal Death Star knowledge. As Vader pointed out to us 40 years ago " The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant to the power of the force"

So got my Mojo back after finishing building my new modelling space in the garage and cracked open a new kit, well actually half of a kit as I've already built the mouse droid. I give you the JPG Productions Gonk droid for those who have not seen the kit before (is there anyone?) this is what you get so I spent some time dry fitting, filling and priming, then forgot to take a picture before I laid down a coat of vallejo metal colour white aluminium i have also painted the corrugated leg sections with Vallejo model air Panzer Grey and the really observant amongst you will spot the leg 'pipes' still in their UMP Black primer. I finished the silver and let everything cure overnight and today assembled the main body with Gorilla Gel superglue and I discovered something new - wiping off excess gorilla gel also removes the Vallejo silver and the primer! this has now Ben touched up and I've also readied the copper colour on the leg 'pipes' using Tamiya dark copper and highlighted with citadel bright copper I have some really good verdigris stuff to put on tomorrow when I get the chance i have also touched up the legs by hand as I had sprayed the silver at far too low a pressure and got loads of spatter all over the panzer grey As you can see this is now fixed. Ignore the fact that the silver fades out this is only the layer I'm chipping to. Next step is a couple of coats of hairspray and then onto the colour scheme I have been trying out on this particular spoon that is vallejo grey blue and the yellow is going around the centre section. Hopefully I'll not mess this all up with the hairspray chipping as my first (and only attempt so far) at this was a disaster but I know what I did wrong - I hope! I'm spraying the yellow down first and then the blue. More tomorrow if if all goes well leigh

Last night I took some photos of my recently completed Bandai 1:144th scale U-Wing. Well, nearly completed - of course I realized I hadn't yet chipped the red markings on the wings yet, so I jumped the gun a tiny bit. Oh well . This was a fun build - the U-Wing kit is very nicely layered, goes together surprisingly easily, and has a lot of possibilities for painting in interesting ways. I'm seriously thinking of picking up another one. I decided to go with a hypothetical Red Squadron color scheme on this. I may yet add some squadron markings on the wings, but I haven't decided what I want there and I'm happy to let it sit for a while. One odd thing - the panel lines on the right wing are noticeably deeper than on the left wing. The fact that they look so much stronger on one in the photos isn't that I washed them unevenly; that seems to be a kit defect. I have no idea if it's on all U-wings, or a subset, or just mine. Anyway - a highly recommended kit, like every Bandai, really. Wings open: Rear engine detail: Top and bottom head-on: With Red Leader for size comparison: And in formation with a bunch of different Rebel fighters:

Good evening. My rendition of the X-wing flown by Poe Dameron from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, one of the most beautiful sci-fi craft ever designed (in my opinion). This is the Bandai kit with the annoying multi-coloured plastic parts moulded in the colour scheme, making painting both a tad easier and more complicated. I had to glue the wings in the combat deployment to stop me from closing them in temptation and accidentally chip off the paint. The stand is also glued as I broke it while trying to change its position. This was easily the most irritatingly fiddly paint scheme to mask, but it came out 'OK' in the end. It was also my first time using MIG Ammo washes (brown for German yellow on the orange and grey, and stone grey for black on the black); I will now almost exclusively use these due to their quality. I'm still getting used to my new camera, and I can't seem to work out how to get the whole model in the picture to not get blurry. Enjoy!

Not only venturing into a new area of the site but finished a project, ok this is my second attempt at painting her but this time I brush painted her with all Tamyia and the white parts got a Mr Hobby pearl top coat. The wood base started life as a pepper grinder. If I did another I would change the helmet angle a bit and not loose the scope from the gun but overall Im happy with her. Your feedback is welcome. Cheers Brian.

Hello! It has been an age since I finished anything so I wanted to restore my mojo with a quick and easy build. This is Revell's 1:100 U-Wing which I have re-painted and added a few small details to. The cockpit was detail painted as well as the crew figures. I added a door gunner and some figures to the base. It was completed in a weekend and was great fun to do. Hope you like it!

Here is my Bandai X-Wing. These little kits are fantastic, easy to build and a cracking level of detail. Painted in Humbrol enamels & washed with PLW black night by Ammo. I wanted to go with a different paint scheme and seemed to have come up with one Boba Fett would be happy with. Please enjoy the following. Time to start on the AT-ST. C&Cs welcomed. Thanks for looking.

This is BC-44, otherwise known as 'Blue' for fairly obvious reasons. It's another re-paint of Bandai's C-3P0, and the idea for it came about while I was working on Boris. I'd given him some fetching blue leg stripes, and I though a droid done entirely in blue would look interesting. I got the kit just after christmas, and the plating has been stripped off for a few months, but I've only just got around to painting him. Actually, I say him, but I'd thought of making Blue a female protocol. There isn't actually any difference in the body panels, so he/she could go either way. At the moment Blue is err... undecided. Boris has been making some advances though, and he doesn't seem to be that picky one way or the other Thanks for looking Andy

From BANDAI's site; http://bandai-hobby.net/sw/jp/products/millenniumfalcon_72_1.html Two things you can say, it is going to bee good, and its going to be expensive! Julien

Hello again. Taking a break from the tiny 144 star fighters to start on this AT-AT. Ive seen a few of these being built, and couldn't wait to start mine! Here is the base coat over the preshade. I used Tamiya NATO black as the preshade, and used Tamiya Light Grey as the base coat. Then I gave everything a gloss varnish, followed by an oil wash. Once the oil has completely dried, everything will get a second coat of gloss varnish, followed by some more oil streaks in different colors. I'm liking the way its coming together so far. Ill try to keep the weathering subtle so it matches the scale of this thing. Thanks for looking!

Hi there, Long time listener, first time caller, as they say on call-in radio shows. I recently got back into plastic kit modeling after an absence of....oh, let's call it a round three decades. My dad got me the 1/72 + 1/144 Bandai Red Squadron 2-pack for the holidays last year, and after a few months putting off doing anything waiting until I'd picked up an airbrush and made a good workspace in my apartment, I said "Ah, hell..." and jumped into building the tiny X-wing, on account of it being tiny and having water-slide decals. Well, needless to say I was completely hooked immediately. I'll post some of the other vehicles as well, but to start off here's some progress on my latest, my first Gold Squadron Y-wing. This Y-wing I decided would depart from canonical accuracy in a few ways - I like my engine nozzles to look more like real-world engine nozzles, so this one is a dark-ish metal base with sooty pastel weathering. Rather than the yellow stripe on the engine nacelle, I decided this Y-wing once upon a time had fully yellow painted nacelle nose cones, but much of the paint flaked off quite a bit from one too many hyperspace jumps. I also detailed some of the other greeblie bits on the engine pods with metallic paints (mostly shades of Vallejo Duraluminum). Here they are assembled, but with the main engine body pre-weathering. And for the body, I similarly put in a lot of metallic accents. It doesn't make sense to me that all the innards would be painted white under the armor plating that the Rebel Alliance inexplicably removed.... (I need to get way better at detailing those R2-units, though) Still more weathering to be done, but I love how this is coming together. The vehicle model kits are *so* much fun to build! And the skills-rebuilding mistakes hurt a lot less with how inexpensive these kits are :). Full size pics on my Flickr Photostream, along with more that I'll post in this thread eventually. Thanks so much to all the amazing modelers posting on this forum! It's been really inspirational, and gives me so much to draw on.

This is Bandai's latest addition to their ever growing Star Wars range, and probably their best one yet. They've done an incredible job both with the moulding, and with the engineering, meaning the kit has some stunning detail, and will slot together perfectly. The only thing they need to do is make it BIGGER. The original studio models famously featured a raft of parts from various classic Tamiya, Revell and Airfix kits, and Bandai have faithfully reproduced all of these, the most obvious one being the German Sd.Kfz 222 Armoured Car that sits on the back of the AT-AT's hull. For this build I've gone with a non-movie dark colour scheme, which was based on some profile artwork I produced for the project. You could see it as a special forces version, or anything at all really. I'm leaving it open to interpretation. The full build is here The original artwork that was used for inspiration And the build itself And some scale comparisons, first with the proverbial paint pot With Bandai's 1/144 Y-Wing... (at this point @Gekko_1 will be thinking up plans for a AT-TC (All Terrain - TIE Carrier)) And, obviously, with a Nigel top hat Thanks for looking Andy

Well it's been a while, (had a bit of modelling mojo loss), but finally i've finished my Sandtrooper, the construction of this build couldn't have been simpler, And has been covered by other folk on here , for example Andy Moore, whose work has been an inspiration whilst working on the various Bandai stuff i've got stashed. The whole figure was assembled in sub sections where it was possible and then sprayed with a couple of coats of Vallejo SATIN varnish, weathering was mainly MiG engine oil for the darker coloured sand and smudges, and MiG Gulf war Sand weathering powders for the lighter tones, The supplied Decals were used for the various helmet markings, and the pauldron was painted with Vallejo Model Air 'aged white'. Base was covered in Tamiya surface texture 'paint' to which fine sand was added with copious amounts of watered down PVA glue, then painted in various sand/desert colours, and a few Model Builder grass tufts added for a bit of variety. He was finished in a style to replicate the Sandtrooper named as Davin Felth...'Look Sir !..Droids'. anyhoo, onto the pics. Comments appreciated..

start of another ancient kit

A few weeks ago I posted a Star destroyer from Bandai. So much fun I thought I'd give another a go and try a slightly different approach to the paint finish. Below is the result. A final pic with her sister ship. Thanks for looking Ian

Hello everyone! My first entry into the Sci Fi section of this amazing forum! I have built pretty much all of Bandai's 1/72 Star Wars vehicles, but these are my first in the smaller 1/144 scale. I am very impressed with the amount of detail in these little things! So far I have two X-Wings, one Y-wing, the Tie Fighter set, the Millennium Falcon, and the new AT-AT in 1/144. My plan is to put the Falcon and the Rebel Fighters together with the Ties. I have other plans for the AT-AT. Here are the three main ships I started on. The Y-wing has to wait, because I only have 20 alligator clips for painting I started by building most of the sub-assemblies and priming them. I tired using a new Vallejo black primer. In the past, I had tried using alcohol based thinners to thin Vallejo, such as Mr. Levelling Thinner and Tamiya X-20A. I was never able to get the Vallejo to airbrush well with this method. There was always clogging issues and splattering problems. So this time, I just used distilled water. It worked so much better! I had some issues to start with, but once I worked out the right water to paint ratio, it actually sprayed pretty smooth. Nice thin layers and it leveled itself out and looked nice! I had read that others on this forum and others across the net where seeing flaws in the 144th Tie solar panel wings. Unfortunately mine had the same flaw. I was hoping that the black primer would hide some of this, but it doesn't look like it. Next step is the dreaded masking of the Tie wings and all of the cockpit glass. As for the base coats, I'm thinking Tamiya Ocean Grey RAF for the Ties and somw Vallejo White Gray for the X-wing. Need to do some tests first to see how they look over the black primer. Thanks for looking! Hopefully get some more paint on these soon!

Scale: 1/72Manufacturer: BandaiPaint: Tamiya and Vallejo metalExtras: none Weathering: Dark dirt washDecals: OOB As its Star Wars day i thought i should share my latest build. I decided not to go with the standard box scheme and go for the colours of blue squadron. Let me know what you think. Up next will be my full resin 1/48th version....

I've been hiding in passive mode for a while but had to surface today. I know this is all over the net but I couldn't find it here. Behold the Revell Imperial Star Destroyer! https://www.revell.de/en/products/star-wars/star-wars-episode-iv-vi/id/06052.html?utm_campaign=Revell%2BNewsletter%2B04%25252F2017%2B%252528EN%252529&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Mailingliste-EN Funnily enough it seems to have sold out everywhere, I haven't scraped enough pennies together for it yet anyway I just hope its not a limited run!

My Bandai AT-AT finally turned up yesterday (after the ***** at the post office had fleeced me to the tune of £12 for VAT and misshandling). Before I get going on the build, I thought I'd post up some sprue shots and close ups (there are plenty of other sprue shots out there on the net, so you're probably not seeing anything new here), and today, May 4th, seemed as good a day as any to post them. To see how it all looks built up, jump over to John's multi AT-AT build The box is quite large, but that's mainly taken up by the sprue holding the head and body sections, which have each been slide moulded in one piece. The rest of the sprues are pretty standard Bandai fare Sprue A The neck, parts for the head, the cheek guns, and other assorted bits, including all new 1/144 scale Mr Flatty, now in AT-AT driver disguise (he really is the Mr Benn of the Star Wars world) Sprue B1 The lower body sections that slip inside the main body moulding, and provide some internal detail behind the separate body panels Sprue B2 The chassis parts, including a nice representation of the Pegasus engine used on the original filming models Sprue C This is the one that requires the box to be as big as it is, due to the orientation they've moulded the parts in. You've got the main body, the upper head, the base of the head, and the main chin cannons Sprue D (x2) The last two AT-AT sprues supply all the leg parts, together with the two, microscopically small, seated driver figures The final sprue is for the standard Bandai base, this time in white to represent Hoth. This is the same size base that was supplied with the 1/144 Falcon Some close-ups of the parts, starting with the head and it's base plate The main cannons. These have been slide moulded to leave an open barrel You get a choice of two (slightly) different cheek guns Internal cockpit rear wall. Nicely detailed, considering you won't actually see any of it And no doubt also invisible on the final build, the AT-AT driver. Pretty well detailed for the size (about 8mm high), although someone seems to have amputated his hands The neck. This comes in two halves, split vertically, so there'll be a seam to fill on the top and bottom Main body moulding. Being one-piece, it will at least keep everything square. This is the right-hand side, with the hatches moulded in place. The left side has them separate Lower body inserts, with the detail panels that sit behind the open hatches on the main body There's a small moulding flaw on mine, in the upper left corner of the detail panel. Quite rare for a Bandai kit. Looks like something's hit the part after coming out of the mould. Not a big deal, as I'll probably have the hatches closed. Underside of the chassis and, yes, they are jerry cans on either side More chassis detailing The Pegasus engine And, of course, the 222 hull for the rear panel... ...and the accompanying gun shields The upper parts of the feet are split vertically, so more seams to fill, although the lower foot parts are single mouldings And to give you an idea of just how small an AT-AT is in 1/144... It really is a bit smaller than I'd prefer, which is what stopped me ordering it earlier. I don't think there's much chance we'll see a bigger one from Bandai though, so we'll have to make the most of it. To give you another comparison, this is the Bandai head compared to a Wizards of the Coast AT-AT that I repainted a few years ago. That one is (depending on the measurements you use) just under 1/48 More when I get started on construction Andy

I have been doing small one day builds just to get back into the flow of modelling after a couple of years away from it so have been doing the Revell Star Wars Rogue One kits and just wanted to put them up for all to see. They are not perfect by some of the standard but thank you for looking and any comments are appreciated! This one is the Naboo starfighter and my goodness it was tiny. Enjoy!

Hello All, First time in this section of the forum. Saw one of these a couple of weeks ago on another forum. Was impressed enough to try to track a couple down on online for a quick fun build. So I present Bandai's diminutive non scale Star destroyer. It's about as big as your palm. Superb snap fit engineering although I did use tamiya ultra thin cement to ensure a good fit. - a smidgen of filler was needed to fill a couple of smallish gaps but overall good fun to do. Paint is tamiya primer then gunze acrylic light aircraft gray H332 and some gunze very pale gray H331 and off white H2. Finish this off with some USN white H316 highlights on raised panels and some dappling. a pin wash of varying shades of artists acrylic eye mixed grey and MiG filters and oils from their winter camo set. Apologies for the iphone pics - doesn't really show up the tones very well. Happy Modelling All Ian

Hi all After a few drinks on Sunday I ordered an old AMT 1/6 battle droid and STAP kit, it was under £20 so its not to bad. After thinking about it for a bit I quit like the idea of the battle droid on my desk at work, the STAP will go in the kit bash box.To display the droid he needs a blaster though and I dont think he comes with one, so my question is, Is there a 1/6 blaster that would work or a 1/6 scale real world gun that I could mod? I really dont want to scratch build one ( im not anywhere near that good) Thanks for any help. Brian PS. I have seen the sideshow blaster on ebay and that out of the question at that price.