The Millennium Falcon

The legs and underside need messing up a bit to look like the dirty and grungy Millenium Falcon

First I managed to find some of the old time of plastic bendy straw. These are quite rightly no longer sold in the UK due to the environmental damage they cause, but my local gaming pub let me have a few they still had. I cut these down to add corrugated pipes to the legs – note that my earlier trick of filling paper straws with hot glue to strengthen them does not work with these as the plastic straws will just melt. Instead they are packed with the unused straw offcuts, with just a blog of hot glue on each end to fix them in place. I

Some of the paper straws I had left are used as sleeves to reinforce the straight sections of the plastic straws, and to wrap around any of the pencil woods I used earlier that I think will look better round than hexagonal. Then all the new material is primed black, and using a make-up brush Drybrushed mid-grey to bring it into line with what I’ve already painted.

I also added some dark shadow to the recesses of the hull while I had a black primer paint brush in my hand. I use flat red and sick green (valehjo paints) to add warning lights and stop the hull being featureless – the colours are subdued due to dumbfounded overblack, as I don’t want them too prominent from a distance.

The pistons on the legs and ramp are Drybrushed gunmetal grey, stippled with rust effect and bronze paint, then given “scratches” with a shinier natural steel paint (logically these “scratches” should run vertically, but quick horizontal lines always seem to look better).

Typhus corrosion is a GW technical paint I have never used before, but I had some (I think it came free with a partswork magazine) and it work well at adding grunge and texture to the bottom of the legs and leading edges of the side s of the hull. I just stippled off in with an old brush (which the paint finally killed off – don’t use your finest sable brushes with this stuff!)

Finally I use black paint to add shadow where the pistons meet the hull.