A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....

I got myself the CR90/Tantive IV Huge Ship Expansion for X-wing Miniatures. It’s a cool model and pretty accurate, but I wanted to make it more special and decided to convert it into another hero-ship of the Rebellion which we saw in actual combat action and which was modified to make it a dedicated warship – the LIBERATOR from Star Wars REBELS, which was also present in the battle over Scarif.

This entailed not only a repaint to give the model the paint scheme unique to the LIBERATOR, but also some conversion/scratch-building to create and add a heavier Quad-Turbolaser as well as two additional heavy canons mounted on the side docking rings.

After cleaning the model from gluemarks and mold lines, I took off the crookedly attached cylindrical engines and reattached them in order to align them neatly.

Then I undercoated the engine section and the rest of the ship seperately by masking each other. The engine section got a black undercoat and was then misted with a darker mid-grey. The rest of the ship I undercoated mid-grey and misted ist with an off-white.

Next I drybrushed the off-white part of the ship with pure white to pick out raised details, and did the same on the engine section with a ligher mid-grey. I also applied pin-washes to define recessed detail like the panel lines. These steps gave me a neatly shaded and highlighted base to work on without much effort.

The next step was to add some color in the form of the characteristic blue markings and some faded coloring like the dark yellow on the front corner of the upper starboard engine. I also added light-grey scuffs and scratches to the blue markings at this stage.

Now it was time to paint details like the laser cannons on the 4 large dorsal escape pods, and I also scratch-built the heavy Quad-Turbolaser which replaced the standard top dual Torbolaser on the LIBERATOR. I also painted subtle grime, rust spots and streaks as well as some geometrical brightness modulation on larger off-white surfaces to make them look more interesting.

At that stage I realized that both Turbolasers stood out too high above their circular mounts on the FFG model. So, I carefully cut them off, cleaned up the remains of the cut on their mounts, cut off a few millimeters at the base of the turrets and reattached them – they look movie accurate now, neatly nestled into their circular mounts:

What remained to do now – aside from finishing painting the model – was to scratch-build the additional Turbolasers mounted an the port and starboard docking ring: