Hobby | Blue Squadron Standing By

I can't let Dave have all of the Star Wars fun. I was originally intending for this to coincide with May the 4th, but life being what it is I was a little late. I've had a great time with Andor Season 2 (seriously, go watch it), so I've been in the mood for all things Star Wars. I've hade these 3D prints for New Republic E-Wings laying around for a while, and I have a plethora of spare X-Wings, so I went ahead and started painting Blue Squadron. 

The X-Wing Miniatures Game does have official E-Wing models, but I never picked them up and at this point are too expensive for what I'd want them for. They're also the older "Legends" versions, with the blasters on top of the canopy. When the Ahsoka show came out, they were reintroduced into the current canon with newer, sleeker models. I had all the game material I needed from the 2nd edition conversion kit, so I picked up a pair of models from WesJanson3D, who is a licensed printer for Mel Miniatures who did the sculpting.

They're quite good sculpts, with plenty of detail and recesses for washes to get into and make my painting look better than it is. Another thing I got from Ahsoka was the blue color scheme. 

For the first E-Wing I followed the "official" paint scheme almost exactly, except for the blue around the engine intakes. The white is slightly lighter than the Rebel grey on the other starfighters, which I chose to show that these are newer, top-of-the-line fighters that the New Republic is investing in with the Galactic Civil War over. 

For the second model I added some yellow striping just so it's easier to tell the two apart if I play them together. Both got a dab of pink for the engine glow. I didn't do much for the undersides because you will never really look underneath, which saved me time with the striping as there's lots of back and forth to get them straight and even. 

While I was at it and had some extra blue paint on the palette, I took one of my spare X-Wings and gave it a makeover. I used the red markings as a guide and just painted the blue right over it. This made it pretty easy as I just needed to paint within the lines. I did add a little bit of blue to the top of the engine cowlings just to have a little bit more color. 

This was all quite easy, so I may add another X-Wing or two and then I'll have a proper blue squadron. 

-The Space Dinosaur