Star Wars: Couple’s Build

Back on May the 4th, I posted up a fun little couples build themed around Star Wars. The simple snap-together kits from Ban Dai proved to a fun way to spend an evening together with the wife building model kits. At the time, my hope was to finish the quick build off over the weekend, but with airbrush issues and not as much time as I thought I was going to have, these pushed off a bit longer than I had hoped. That said, it did give me time to think about painting all the marking on and doing away with the stickers that came with kits (decals would have been so much nicer.).

The extra time also gave me the opportunity to pick up a second kit of the T.I.E. fighters to get the correct number of “wingmen” for Darth Vader – Frustratingly, Ban Dai doesn’t offer just a standard fighter in their scale, so I re-purchased the kit, and put Vaders Advanced x1 T.I.E. fighter up on eBay. Having more time also allowed me to build a better display stand, the one with the kit does give you space for the two standard fighters, but I don’t like how it clips in the “wing” panels – so I drilled hole in the bottoms and used rods to position them flanking Darth.

Oh, and the last minute addition was two bits of over stretched sprue painted bright green and gloss coated.

As to the wife’s X-wing fighter, she primed and base coated the fighter with my old airbrush, it was her first time using an airbrush, so it was full-on pressure and paint loading! I also talked her out of using the stickers and hand painting the various colored marking on the craft, she did ask me to tidy up a few, which was mostly painting a line between different colors on adjacent panels. I think she did a good job, especially for someone who doesn’t paint figures or models! We opt’ed to paint the gun swirls using thin strips of tape wrapped around each gun-pod, not very evenly spaced, but… (again, I get it that Ban Dai is targeting a non-modeling group, but really how hard are water-slide decals??).