Star wars

Star Wars Build - Razor Crest 2024-01-02

The new year is officially here, and with it my family has been doing all sorts of cleaning and re-organizing so as to kick things off on the right foot.

My personal cleanup effort has mainly involved tidying up the basement, where I found these little display bases on a shelf:

These have been sitting there since December 2021, when I got - and intended to build - three Star Wars model kits.

But then I got intimated by the amount of detailing and weathering work that would be involved, so I only ended up building one of them, while assembling the display stands (and only the display stands) for the other two.

But now I’m tired of seeing these stands lying around, so I vowed to build at least one of these kits before the end of the holiday break:

Star Wars Model Build - R2-D2 & BB-8 (Part 2) 2022-01-05

Ahh R2-D2. The droid that many fans half jokingly consider the true hero of the saga. He’s a big bigger than BB-8, so naturally he’s going to be a more complicated build. I’m curious, however, as to just how much more complicated. There’s only one way to find out.

Painting

Unlike BB-8, I decided that all of R2’s metallic parts needed to be painted. I took a guess and figured that my “Brushed Metal” paint would be the best choice, and I was right. It gave off a good metallic finish that, to my eye, doesn’t look foo far off from the original. I went ahead and painted all his metal parts at the same time (amazingly, I had enough alligator clips for all of them). I’m hoping that this might speed up the build later down the line, since I’ll have fewer pieces to prep.

Millenium Falcon Model Kit 2020-04-25

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.

Christmas 2019 Star Wars Kits - Corellian Corvette 2020-02-05

We move on to the next in my long line of Star Wars model kits from the Christmas season - the Corellian Corvette (AKA the “Blockade Runner” AKA Tantive IV). This was part of a double pack with the Millenium Falcon, which makes sense because … uhhhh … it’s Han and Leia’s ships? Sure, I can go with that.

Here is the kit’s single runner.

And here are the decals:

That seems like just the right amount of pieces to me. As you can see, the plastic is a cream color, and as I wrote about recently, this either is or is not color accurate. Regardless, I stuck with this cream color, as it is fairly unique among SW craft. That means no hand painting, which should mean this build is a cinch, right?

Right?

On the Coloring of Star Wars 2020-01-31

If you have read the last few posts on this blog then you know I have been building a bunch of Star Wars kits lately. In doing so I started to notice a trend; These kits both are and are not color accurate out of the box.

Let me give you an example. Take the classic Star Destroyer. Here is how it looks at the start of A New Hope:

Here is one in Empire Strikes Back:

Here is another from Rogue One:

Here is the bare plastic of my Star Destroyer model kit:

Birthday 2020 Star Wars Model Kit - AT-M6 2020-01-21

I never expect to get model kits (or model kit supplies) as gifts, but I’m on a roll lately. Now it seems as if everyone in my family wants to encourage my habit hobby. At Christmas I got a new workbench, some Star Wars kits, and some new modeling compound. For my birthday this month I got a workbench chair:

Another, different set of of modeling compounds:

The first set was all metallics for chipped/scratched paint, but this set is for dust/grime/snow

And lastly, another Star Wars kit, one that I must admit came entirely out of left field: