How I Painted: An X-Wing from the game X-Wing, which has X-Wings in it

Recently I have playing Fantasy Flight's delightful game about space dogfighting, X-Wing. There aren't just X-Wings in it. Among its many virtues are that the minis come pre-painted.

It's surprisingly hard to find a close-up of this model as it comes.

Technically these are collectibles, so I thought I'd set about ruining them. Inspired, in part, by this series of tutorial videos from Painting Buddha.

No going back now.

We start with a gradient prime from black, through grey, to white, with lighting slightly biased from 3 o'clock and slightly above. Then a carefully applied wash of army painter strong tone, then highlights up with light grey and, um, very very light grey, each slightly adulterated with strong tone wash.

Which takes us to here.

Star Wars wouldn't be Star Wars without a bit of grime, so I plonked some strong tone, dark tone, black paint, and smoke ink and started slopping it about. I cheated a bit by using these weathering mixes to work on the shading as well, and line in some of the panels.

I'm making this all sound very ordered, but with all my mixes from the start of the process still wet on the palette I was popping back and forth between dotting highlights, lining, shading, etc with gay abandon. It's a nice way to work!

Oh, and I blacked in and gloss varnished the cockpit windows while I was at it.

When it comes to X-Wing markings there's an internet rabbit hole of terrifying depth, which I naturally flung myself into with great and nerdy gusto. In the end I went for the simple marking scheme used in A New Hope - specifically Wedge's Red 2. There's considerable discussion about how his astromech droid was patterned, but thankfully I'd used up my enthusiasm for research, so I painted it entirely to my whims.

It was my first time using this tape.

It worked pretty well!

A touch more weathering and chipping, and some varnish (a mix of vallejo matt and satin that seemed to work quite nicely), re-glossing of the cockpit windows, and my work is done.

Whoosh!

Zap!

Swoosh!