X-Wing: Millenium Falcon Partial Repaint

The X-Wing Millennium Falcon model comes with a pretty decent paint job right out of the box. Absolutely nothing wrong with it. However I still felt the need to tinker around with it and decided to give it a partial repaint.

I have two YT-1300 in my collection. I've already done a full repaint of one of them (see here) and I wanted to keep this one as the Millennium Falcon. This means no changing colour scheme, hence it is only a partial repaint as oppose to a full repaint.


The Partial Repaint

As usual, I did a brief research on the interwebs for some inspiration. After about 3.5 seconds I found a very nice video tutorial on Youtube of exactly what I wanted to do with the Falcon. Check it out here:

I pretty much did the same thing as the video. I'm lazy like that. Read on to see how mine turned out.


The Dirty Bit

The main objective I wanted to achieve with this repaint is to make the Falcon look a bit dirtier. It is a ship that has come through some pretty rough times and I wanted to reflect this 'wear and tear' on the model.

This of course is easily done with a wash.

Falcon before the wash

Using GW Agrax Earthshade, I watered the wash down to the consistency of milk and applied it liberally all over the model.

It came out a little too dark for my taste, so what I decided to do was to take an old brush and use it to scrub the flat parts of each armour panel. This left the centre of the panel lighter than the surrounding grooves and crevices.

Falcon after the wash and scrub

The Spot Colours

The stock paint scheme had a few areas picked out with spot colours including grey, red and yellow. I decided to further emphasize this by picking them out with washes/glazes.

I went over the yellow with GW Lamentors Yellow, the red with GW Bloodletter and the grey bits with the old GW Devlan Mud.

This really helps these colours to 'pop'.

They yellows were a lot more vibrant after the glaze

The Black Stuff

The next step was to darken some of the many recesses on the model with a combination of GW Badab Black wash and VJ Model Air Black. The black was applied using an airbrush at low psi (around 15) to give that hazy sooty effect.

The Engine Glow

I also painted the engine glow using the airbrush.

I started with pure VJ Model Air Blue. I masked off areas which I didn't want overspray to hit with cellotape but this proved too unwieldy so I actually took it off later.

I then gradually added VJ Model Air White to the mix and spray in smaller cones towards the centre of the engine to simulate the glow.

I finished off by painting a line of white using a medium brush.

Varnish

I finished up by sealing the model with VJ Matt Varnish and the window cockpits with GW Ardcoat Gloss Varnish. I think I used a little too much matt varnish as it really dulled the colour! But given that the ships in Star Wars has that used look anyway it wasn't such a big deal.

And that's pretty much it!


The Reveal

Meet the new and improved 'heap of junk' that is the Millennium Falcon!:

Freedom Fighters

Facing the might of the Imperial Elites. Pew Pew.

This is what I would call a low effort, high impact repaint. Very easy to do but really helps distinguish your model from everyone else's.

I will be doing a lot more partial repaints in the near future so stay tuned and on target!