I've finished my X-Wing. It's an old AMT/ERTL kit I've had in the stash for at least a decade, a Christmas gift one year from my sister. I had all kinds of ideas about fitting it with LED lights in the engines and doing some background lighting on the diorama I had planned for it - but when I really got a look at this kit, I threw all that out the window and just built it. The kit is garbage - little detail, poor fit, and generally making me wish I had decided to build my FM X-Wing instead. Oh well, I did still build this thing and I did build the diorama.
I'm calling the diorama "Wedge Escapes" and depicts the sequence after Wedge has fired on the reactor core of the Death Star in Return of the Jedi and is now racing through the tunnels looking for an exit before the Death Star explodes.
This is the magazine I used as a source material, in addition to watching that part of the movie again.
This is the actual photograph from the magazine.
And without further delay, here is the X-Wing:
The diorama was constructed on a thin piece of wood I nailed together to form the wall and the floor, so to speak, with gray foam board applied atop. I cut styrene sheet and rod to form the braces you see, plus those tubes, and used the container that all my spring-loaded clips came in from Sears to form the big red tube. Paint for the diorama was Testors spray cans of red and gray. I painted the X-Wing with a light gray and dark gull gray for the engines, then went after it with jet exhaust, burnt metal (both Model Master metallics), and Tamiya weathering pastels. I really hated the molded in pilot figure so I painted over the canopy gloss black.