Electric Indigo

I just found somebody on a similar track:

If the kit is as bad as you say, then your build is proof that the magic is in the paint job. Great weathering and photography!

Some details:

Your choice for a business jet with combat radar. Great build and a really cool scheme, it could easily pass for a larger scale IMO.

A true museum piece! Would love to see an outdoor shot of it.

I love the colors and weathering effects! Top quality build.

It's in store at Hobbysearch!

The iconic promo shot of a TIE fighter chasing an X-Wing was maybe the first image I've seen from Star Wars. The thought of re-creating it with models was always in the back of my head, but was only turned into action decades later when it was ignited by the idea of putting X-Wing markings on the Shinden after I noticed the vaguely similar layout of the fuselages. The Shinden is the Hasegawa J7W1 kit, and I chose the Henschel Hs-132A from RS Models for the Imperial counterpart. The plan was to modify the kits as little as possible, so no double wings on the Shinden and only a bit more pronounced guns were added on the Henschel. This weekend I finally got just deep enough into Terragen to fabricate the cloud background for the shot.

For the enthusiasts:

The colors and weathering are spot on, congratulations to the result! Also, great work on the little details. I assume that you didn't apply a panel line wash? Those Trumpeter lines stand out enough on their own IMO.

A masterfully finished example:

It's good to see this kit built with only light weathering. The metal areas are works of art!

It must have been in the mid-90s, when I was visting comic fairs on a regular basis and got hold of some issues of Hobby Japan modeling magazine. Aside from the gazillions of Gundams (which all looked the same to me at that time), discovering the kits from the manga epic "The Five Star Stories" by Mamoru Nagano was a life-changing experience in the class of Star Wars or Heavy Metal magazine. It took some time to find sources for the kits (that was before The Internet), and then the courage and skills to actually build one. The early V-Siren is one of the more elusive and, even by Five Star Stories' standard, flamboyant designs from the series (here's some info about it at Gears online)The resin kit is free-pose, and getting it into a convincingly balanced pose can be a truly nerve-wrecking affair. Sanding, pinning, masking & painting it has kept me busy since the end of April. Some work in progress pics are in the Flickr album.

An impressive beast, and I love the colors. I'm also regularly stunned by what people can achieve with a brush.

Don't worry - Timothée doesn't age. I'm very happy about the overall enthusiastic reception I see. SF seemed to have come down to decoration for animated superhero comics lately. I also welcomed the monolithic, more architecural approach to spaceship design. Minor letdowns IMO were the Sardaukar outfits, again they look like guys in Hazmat suits. The Harkonnen soldiers were much more menacing, and they got some cool hardware, too. The movie won me over right at the beginning with the Harkonnen harvester sequence.