TIE Advanced X1 Revel easykit

Whilst I was in France in the summer I happened to walk past a model shop which had some Star Wars model kits in the window which caught my eye. In the end I chose the TIE Advanced X1 kit as the most interesting one to build. The kit was one of the Revel "easykit" range which means that theoretically you need no glue or paint to build the model, but I ingored this theory and went ahead and painted and glued bits as I felt they would benefit. It seems that Revel have bought the rights to sell Star Wars plastic kits, I saw several more this summer in various places of different models, including a version of the Millenium Falcon which looks very similar to my original AMT/ERTL model of the Falcon that I have half-built at home. I believe this is good news for the Star Wars modeller as the old models were beginning to get a bit hard to find.

Spray Painted: Harder to see in the photo, but the texture of the spray paint was so much better than the bare plastic.

Lick of Paint: Just a minute or two to paint this section at the back of the cockpit, but a real improvement.

Side Overview: A side on view of the finished model.

Finished Thing: A front on view of the finished model.

Cockpit Detail: Detail view showing the repainted lasers, and the dark grey inside the cockpit.

There are just a few minor modifications I made to the model as I built it that I think improve the general appearance of it considerably. First and most importantly I sprayed all the bare plastic parts with a matt paint almost exactly the same colour. This may seem like a waste of paint, but believe me the difference between bare plastic and matt painted plastic is quite astounding, the model looked a huge amount better for the extra effort. I used some really old Humbrol Azure Blue paint mixed about half and half with matt white to get the colour about right for the TIE fighter. I masked the black painted sections of solar panel on the wings, but didn't bother with any of the other details which I painted in again by hand later. Ideally I would have painted it all grey and then done another coat of black over the solar arrays since they weren't really black enough anyway, but I didn't really have time. Another modification I made was painting the inside of the cockpit dark grey. The bottom half of the hull is hidden by the interior cockpit detail pieces which stick in, but the top is not hidden and would probably look pretty bad if it was left light coloured. I also painted the inside of the clear plastic piece that fits in the cockpit hatch so that you can't see through that to the bottom of the light coloured plastic piece. Inside the cockpit I also found that the ends of the command chair where it was attached to the sprue were left light grey, clearly this would have looked terrible if you could actually see them through the cockpit window, so I cleaned them flat and then carefully painted over them with a matt black paint leaving the sprue marks entirely invisible. The only other bits I felt were really improved by painting were the laser tips which I painted in a bright gloss red which was much brighter and glossier than the paint that had been used on them.

So in summary, this is a good model kit that has a satisfyingly good finish to it, but it will look even better if you're not afraid to do a bit of painting gluing and trimming.

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