WIP: BB-8 (Bandai)

Continuing the modelpalooza with the newest droid in a galaxy far, far away!


My family has been out camping during spring break, and I'm home with a pretty rough cold, so I'm using the time alone to spend some time making headway on models. I've updated the blog a lot more than recent, and doubled my Youtube video count (not hard when you have 5 videos), but that's a lot to do for somebody with afull time job and a family with two kids under 10. I had a failed attempt at paint incompatibility on a car I tried, so in an attempt to find a fast kit to build to get my mojo back, I pulled BB-8 out of the closet.

First off, let me say this might possibly be the single best engineered kit I've ever seen. No hyperbole, this thing is amazing. The parts slide together in such a way as to render any seams moot. Absolutely incredible how its layered, even better than Fine Molds' Y-Wing. I originally intended to video the whole thing, but 1) my battery died halfway through airbrushing and I didn't know, and 2) the parts, when test fitted, become permanently attached, so a quick session of painting ended up becoming almost the whole kit built in one sitting.

So the plastic is molded in the exact colors it needs to be, but I don't recommend building it unpainted. It still looks like plastic. The GOOD news is that you can segment all the parts and paint them without any masking or worry. I cut out all the white parts, and painted them a 50/50 mix of gloss white and flat white. I got the "silver" parts and painted them Alclad Aluminum, and the orange parts are about 6 parts Tamiya orange to 1 part Flat Earth.

A closer look at the orange. I'm happy with the color. I'm not by any stretch an art major, I know nothing about color theory, I just wing my color mixes and hope for the best. The flat earth brown tones the orange down just enough.

And once the paint dries, its a simple matter of putting all the pieces together. I'm still waiting on the white to dry on the body section, but here's the finished head, minus the antennae...I didn't want to assemble that part yet, since they're quite fragile.

So that's it! A model that looked moderately complicated at first, especially with the all-Japanese instructions, became a cakewalk and almost completed in a single day. Thanks for looking!!!