All Wings Report In

Today we have a guest article from our very own Red 7, "Foxy" Johnson, on how to paint up your very own Red Squadron.

Mr. Blackheart and I have been playing a whole lot of X-Wing recently. After a couple of games, we thought it'd be super-neato if the X-Wings were painted to represent the individual pilots. Given that the Rebel Alliance scrounges material from pretty much anywhere it can, it makes sense that no two X-Wings would look the same (much unlike the Empire, which seems to have an unlimited defense budget).

As a long time 40K player (I got the Rogue Trader book for my 11th birthday), painting miniatures is almost a force of habit. For some reason (most likely laziness), I was pretty hesitant to get going on this project. As I was perusing the X-Wing forums on the 'Geek, I saw a link that ultimately led to this post: (http://buckaroo13.blogspot.com/2012/09/x-wing-painting-red-5...) (if I could find the BGG post, I'd link it here, but I haven't had any luck). The post is a great article on how to go about painting your X-Wings. Yep - that post is what I needed to get started on painting our own X-Wings!

Righty-o - enough talk. Let's get on with it, shall we?

Red Leader

Red 2- Wedge Antilles

Red 3 - Biggs Darklighter

Red 4 - John D.

Red 5 - Luke Skywalker

Red 6 - Jek Porkins

Paint Palette

When it comes to painting, I'm extra-super lazy. As such, I will go to great lengths to avoid doing mixing of any kind. Shown below are the paints I used. Where possible, I've included the company's color code in parentheses:

Tamiya Deck Tan (XF-55) - matches the X-Wing miniature's hull color perfectly.
Tamiya Flat Red (XF-7) - matches the X-Wing "racing stripe" and wing markings almost perfectly. Also used for Red Leader's Astromech droid.
Tamiya Yellow Green (XF-4) - used for the "yellow" parts/patchwork of the X-Wing's hull (e.g. Red 5's nose stripe, nosecones of Red 2, 4 and 6, yellow trim on Red 4).
Tamiya Flat Yellow (XF-3) - used only for the R2 unit on Red 4's X-Wing.
Citadel Color Ice Blue (61-36) - Used for "candy striping" on laser cannon barrels.
Citadel Color Fortress Grey (61-53) - used for parts/patchwork (primarily the nosecone stripe on Red 4)
Citadel Foundation Mechrite Red (??) - used for red components on the hull of Red 6.
Citadel Color Chaos Black (61-51) - used for touching up canopy windows on Red 4 and Red 6. Also used for the "dagger" symbol on Red 2's hull.
Citadel Color Rotting Flesh (??) - used for a couple spots of slightly greenish patchwork on Red 3 and Red 6.
Citadel Washes Badab Black (??) - for some of the battle damage/weathering on Red Leader. Also to touch up some of the weathering effects in general

NOTE - Games Workshop updated their entire paint range, so some of the Citadel Colors won't be an exact match under their new names.

Oh yeah - one other thing. I strongly recommend rinsing your X-Wing miniatures in warm soapy water before painting them. I soaked ours in warm water with some liquid dish washing detergent for @ 5 minutes. I scrubbed them lightly with a toothbrush, rinsed them and let them air dry. I found that if I didn't do this, the paint (particularly the Tamiya paint) wouldn't really stick to the miniature.

Other Tools
Brushes - I used a Citadel Fine Detail Brush and a Floquil Golden Fox/Renard D'or F302.
Masking Tape - nothing fancy, just the plain ol' masking tape that you can find at any hardware store.

Inspiration
Like I said before, this blog post (http://buckaroo13.blogspot.com/2012/09/x-wing-painting-red-5...) kicked the idea of painting the X-Wing miniatures to look like the individual Red Squadron fighters into motion.

Reference Material
I used the following photographs as reference. I'm not exactly sure where they found data for the paint schemes, so I can't be 100% certain if they're canon. In particular, there seems to be some debate over Red 6's paint scheme (as near as my amateur eyes can tell, the red canopy/trim did not make it into the final film). However, the paint schemes for Red 4 and Red 6 are really freakin' awesome, so that's what I went with.

Paint Schemes for Red 2, Red 3, Red 4 and Red 6 (http://www.modelermagic.com/?p=40137) (this was my primary source).
Red 2 Commission (http://www.therpf.com/f10/x-wing-red-2-commission-157614/) (used primarily as cross-reference w/the first site cited above).
Red Leader (http://www.modelermagic.com/?p=30066)
Red 12 (http://www.modelermagic.com/?p=11564) (haven't painted this one yet, but I might have to... [I think we might need another "generic" Red Squadron pilot])

Stay on Target

and listen to the voices in your head