The named X-Wing pilots see a fair amount of tabletop play. It was time to paint up their fighters so they could take to battle in full glory!   Last week I was getting ready to run demo games at the Pax East convention here in Boston, and part of that prep work included painted these in time for the show.

This was another relatively simple repaint project, just painting over the factory generic red markings. A quick flip through Google Images brought up plenty of references to go by.

I wanted a slightly deeper red than the factory finish so it would be more noticeable out on the gaming table. Testors’ Flat Red was just right. Russian Marker Yellow for the faded yellow markings. Dunkelblau for the spiral stripes on the laser cannons.  And an assortment of grays for touch up work: Russian Topside Gray, French Light Blue Gray, and a bit of dark Gunship Gray.

To get the ship number markings on the wing panels, I painted a red, one-piece solid L-shape first. When that was dry, used a 10/0 brush and Russian Topside Gray to separate out the hash marks that show the number of each ship and to paint over any remaining area of the red block that wasn’t needed.

The droids were also painted to match the ones with each ship. For Garven Dreis flying Red One, used an X-Acto to give the droid on the ship a flat-topped head before painting his red R5-K6.

Coloured the ship number tokens with an orange highlighter. I’ve done up a large set of these for the Rebel side.