So I’m near the final stages of the Snowspeeder painting and am waiting for oils to cure before my final flat coat and pigment applications. This is the perfect time to bust out the sculpey and start on some more Hoth diorama figures.  Next up is a 1/48 scale Tauntaun. I downloaded a bunch of reference pics and using the riders as a size reference figured out how big it’d be in 1/48 scale.  I was shocked to find out it would be smaller than I thought it’d be. That makes it a little more difficult to sculpt in details, but no matter… it needs done!

All of the pics show these guys with their tails on the ground when moving. That seems odd to me given what’s known about dinosaur movement these days. (probably a necessary evil on the part of the model makers to get it to move neatly) Since they have the same basic shape I decided I would modify the pose a bit to show it running a little harder than seen before in the film with the tail in the air.

I started out with a wire armature and bulked the chest area up with a small ball of foil and then covered that in some wire mesh. Over that I started applying sculpey to get the basic shape down. I started by sculpting and detailing the head since that would be the hardest part. I figured I could hold the body if necessary for extra support while sculpting. Glad I did! After that I started applying the rest of the shape and arms.

I think this is as far as I can go for now before I need to bake it to add more details and the other leg. The leg will need to be removable for casting. I’ll also sculpt the saddle and straps then. After another bake I’ll do the rider and it’ll be ready to go!

EDIT: Couldn’t resist so I added the saddle. You can also see the start of the left leg and where it will be cut off.

Here’s the latest on the build-up of the four Snowspeeders. First I airbrushed some German Gray onto the rear engine parts to darken them up as per the reference. Then I applied a clearcoat of Future and the decals. Those went on quite smoothly except that since I wasn’t using the kit-supplied stripe decals I needed to carefully cut out the orange boxes on the gray speeder on the sides of the air-breaks to remove the gray.Once the decals were done I applied a thin flat coat for the next steps.

I applied the paint chips using neutral gray with a very fine brush then afterwards added more with some sponge to get the finer masses of chips and scrapes.

After the chips I added an warm buff colored filter in order to warm up the cool gray of the initial painting. After that I applied the discoloration with oil paints. This is done by adding small dabs of oil paint (I use and love the 502 Abteilung brand… very fine and smooth!) then blending them and streaking them with clean odorless turpenoid. For this I used Dark Mud, Navy Blue, Buff, and Dark Rust colors. Below you can see the difference between the discolored speeder (left) and the one with just a filter applied (right). Notice that it gives you subtle variations in the surface color making it appear more worn.

Once that dried overnight I went back and added more Dark Mud oils to the gun crevasses and engine parts. I also applied slightly thicker filters of either Dark Rust or Snow White 502 oils to further accentuate panels.

Next I’ll use some thinned 502 oils and apply a thin wash to just the panel lines. No need to get sloppy with a thick wash covering all the color variations. After that I’ll apply another flat coat and then do the soot-streaks, rust, and grime with Mig pigment powders.

As it turns out, what was to be a HUGE diorama has turned into two dioramas… one pretty big and one smaller. No worries and just as fun for me! When it was released I purchased four 1/48 scale Fine Molds Snowspeeders with two earmarked for these dioramas and two for fun.

I opened the 4 boxes and started construction on this quartet on Sunday morning. By Monday evening I was priming the kits. They’re very simple and straight forward to build with only a few easy areas needing seams fixed or gaps filled.

Once the primer had cured I sprayed the interiors with Tamiya Neutral Gray then using a small brush painted in the details. After a quick spray of Future Floor Acrylic to seal it I applied a wash of thin 502 Abteilung blue + black oil paint to pop the control details. After that I applied tape to the insides of the canopy frames to mask the interior and set about painting the exterior.

At first I was going to use the hairspray technique, but after looking at references of the studio models I decided that level of chipping would be excessive. Instead I started by painting all four speeders in Tamiya Neutral gray then painted over that with a very light gray… almost white, but not quite. When that cured I went about painting on the markings instead of using the provided decals. While I love orange on the speeder, nothing I’ve seen, studio models or film shots seem as orange as Fine Molds decals do.  If anything it’s red-orange (to me) so that’s what I did for two of them.  The other two I mimicked the gray scheme of Luke’s speeder as seen on the Master Replica version which I had lots of pics of in an old issue of TMMI since I couldn’t find shots of the actual model used.

To paint the markings and chips I first masked everything with Tamiya tape. Then using Mig’s Liquid Mask and a sponge I dabbed on what would be the chips after painting. Then I painted the markings, rubbed off the mask, and repeated as needed for the different colors. It was a LOT of work! LOL!

Next up, airbrushed dark soot and darker chipping.

Slacking again… I had actually almost finished these months ago, but due to other commitments I had put them aside for a bit. Today I spent 20 minutes finishing them up and now they’re ready to be shown and shipped to my client. Eventually these two 1/72 scale Tie Interceptors  by Fine Molds will be paired with my Y-Wing for a chase-scene diorama. For now though they’ll be enjoyed sitting on my client’s shelf until I’m ready to tackle the project.

Because I did these a few months ago and didn’t do an in-prog report I can’t recal much of what I did, paint-mixes, etc… I know I used some Tie Fighter canopy masks I purchased at Starship Modeler. They were decent, but left way too much residue on the canopies. To keep them from ebing a boring solid color I used oils for discoloration and to highlight panels.

The Y-Wing is complete. The plan is for this to be part of a larger diorama down the road, so not a ton of images or a detailed base. The base is the stock one that came with the kit spray painted in matte black. The last step was to apply various Mig Pigment powders to do the scorch marks and engine burn. For the engines I used both “Plasma Burn” (blue) and Rock Exhaust” from their Fantasy line. To seal the pigments I sprayed the Mig Fixer lightly onto the kit with my airbrush. This seems to be the best way to use it unles your pigments are in piles. Then the airbrush would blow them away. Anyway, here’s the pics!