This kit has been lying around since January. It is one of the only ones I never got around to building, the other being a tiny X-Wing kit. I’ve already built this same size X-Wing before, so the prospect of doing it again is not quite as exciting.
But the Falcon? How could any Star Wars fan put that ship in the backlog? I’ll tell exactly what kind of Star Wars fan would do that -
The kind that is intimidated by it.
If I could get a bit grandiose for a moment, I assert that you don’t really have Star Wars if you don’t have the Falcon. You could replace this ship with any other design, and it would still be important to the lore. As long as it is the ship that carries Han, Luke, and Leia, it will always be important to the lore.
But if you have a different design, you lose the vibe, the feel, the essence that makes Star Wars so appealing. You have to have the piece of junk that made the Kessel Run in under twelve parsecs, that can make it .5 past lightspeed. It has to be that ship that looks like nothing and everything you have ever seen before, moving through space in ways both unfamiliar and thrilling.
You need this. Damn. Ship.
And I am so scared to try and put together a model of something that represents so much of what I love about the fictional setting I have loved the most, and for the longest time.
But hey, there is a global pandemic still raging, one that makes the future more and more uncertain with each passing day. If I can find a way to stop being scared, and just have fun with this build, it could become one of the best acts of self care I could give myself. Time to stop hiding and start working.
This is going to be a unique build. Just take a look at the runners:
I can already tell that the Falcon is going to be one of the largest of these mini Star Wars kits once it is assembled, and yet it may have the lowest total piece count of them all. The trick is that while the total part count is low, the amount of total detail is insane.
Next, take a look at the decal sheet. There are a ton of stickers, and each one is extremely small:
Normally I opt for decals whenever possible, but not this time. I can already tell that on a kit this small, these decals are going to look awful. I need to hand paint all of this detailing myself, and that is what scared me the most about this build.
As luck would have it, I came up with a strategy. Basically, I find all the places that red decals are used and paint them all in one go. After letting it dry, I would find all the places with tan decals and paint those in one go. Rinse and repeat with any other colors, and the major detailing would be complete. Then it would merely be a matter of weathering (which is much easier said than done).
Here is how things looked after painting the red and tan sections:
I learned my lesson from the Corellian Corvette. This time I waited for the red paint to fully dry before cleaning off any excess. I also tried to make the paint mix a bit thicker so it would run less. And I got out a new cuticle stick, one with a much finer point, which gave me more control and precision when scraping out excess paint. The results are not perfect, but I think they are an improvement.
The Falcon has a couple sections where the outer hull is missing, and the “guts” of the ship are exposed. These were done up with a simple black wash, followed by a very slight touch of metallic weathering compound. I didn’t want them to shine, but I did want a bit of a metallic glimmer, something to signify that these parts are not meant to be exposed to the elements.
One thing I have yet to figure out is how to replicate the glow of a ship’s engine nacelles. Each time I build a kit I try something new, but so far none of my ideas come close to nailing the look. This time I attempted to channel my inner Bob Ross. No, that doesn’t mean I put on an afro and painted some happy trees. Ross’ popularity was built not just on his hair and his voice, but on his (in)famous “wet on wet” technique, in which he did an entire painting before any single layer of paint could dry. If done correctly, the technique allows one to use a (intentionally) limited color palette and still achieve shading, gradients, and fine details, all due to the way the paints blended together.
Of course, the technique Ross used was designed for oil paints, and I am using acrylic. There was no telling if the result will be the same, but it was worth a shot.
Here are the results:
It doesn’t come out quite as clearly in a photo, but the results are good, but not perfect. Certainly better than anything I’ve tried before, but still not quite what I was going for. At the very least it no longer looks like a straight sky blue, but is indeed a mix of blue and white. Dipped in some clear acrylic, it should do the trick well enough.
After all this, I painted the grey sections, then used a black paint wash on all the side walls of the ship. Looking at the instructions, it appears as if the builders at Bandai made the rear walls much darker than the ones near the front of the ship. While I tried to replicate this, generally speaking I found myself going for a lighter touch all across the board. I’ve been heavy handed with the paint washes in the past, and I found it to be difficult, if not impossible, to undo my work when things got too dark. This time I wanted to be cautious - I could always add more if I needed to. Overall, I think it was the right choice:
The final bit of work was to add some weathering and final detailing. I was actually proud of how well this part turned out. For one, I chose not to panel line all the little cracks and creases, and it turned out to be a better decision than I ever could have expected.
You see, if you look long enough at the instructions for these Star Wars kits, you begin to notice that the people who build them for photographing shy away from full, Gundam-style panel lining. Instead, they tend to favor a lighter, more subtle kind of shading, or in some cases no shading at all. At first I thought this was odd - that is, until I tried panel lining the Corellian Corvette and became horrified with the results.
Here’s the thing about panel lining - it makes sense when the model represents a cartoon robot drawn with strong, thick lines. On a model that represents a real vehicle - or in the case of Star Wars, a prop that was nevertheless built in the real world - such heavy handed shading is unrealistic. Even the dirtiest spaceship is not going to have a perfectly uniform, thick black line running across every crack and crevice.
After finally coming to this realization, I took a different approach with the Falcon. I used the remaining black paint wash to fill in the lines and to add some general weathering to the model. After a few minutes I wiped it all down so as not to cover my kit with black-looking water stains. The result was a thin, uneven layer of soot across the body of the ship, with some (but not all) the cracks and lines being lightly shaded. In other words, it looked good without going overboard.
Finally, I got a bit daring and tried to chip off some of the red paint, to give the ship a bit more of a “worn and weathered” feel. I could have gone further than I did, but I was already pretty nervous about attempting this in the first place. I had to stop myself from trying to repaint and correct, because doing so would almost certainly have been a nightmare.
With that done, it was time to use the last bit of clear coat I had left in the can. And now, here it is, the final build:
And now we get to the final stinger of this piece - this build, the one I was so afraid of, the one I thought would take me weeks to complete, was done in a single day, over the course of two sittings.
This build meant a lot to me. Not only did I not screw it up, but I succeeded because I finally stopped giving in to my worst habits and tendencies, and finally - finally - used the lighter touch. Not only did it end up looking better, but it meant the build took less time on account of me not having to fix my own mistakes.
It may not look like much, but it’s got it where it counts.