I am very new to painting and would like some very easy to follow instructions on how to make good looking damage to my ships. Any advice would help, thank you in advance.

It depends on the amount of damage you want to apply. If it's just a small ding here and there, then that's quite easily achieved. Just carefully carve a suitable amount of damage into the wing/fuselage/wherever and then drybrush the damaged area with a dark brown suitable to represent scorching. When you've finished that, drybrush over the damaged area again with black but this time don't go as far as you did with the brown.

Here's a work in progress 40K Space Wolf Landspeeder. I lost the side door when I was building it, so I decided that it got blown off instead.

First I carved up the edges a bit, painted it with it's chapter colours and drybrushed it and applied the decals. The I gave it a generous brown drybrush over the damage, then overpainted with black but not completely covering the brown. Then added some even more recent battle damage in the form of bullet hits by drilling shallow hits and painting them silver. The other exposed metal areas were just shallow carved pieces. The damaged bits were painted black, then painted over with silver. This gave the effect of bare metal under a black undercoat, then the chapter colours on top, but was actually painted in reverse. The end result is damaged but still flying speeder.

After I'd finished all this, I found the missing door panel.

I know it's not X-wing, but the same process still applies. Maybe not the bullet hits though.

Hello !

Look at this tuto done by macrossVF1.

Easy and really good look !

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/138255-tutorial-scratches-dents-and-blaster-hits/

Sponge packing from electronics, especially the big piece that comes with a computer motherboard, is good when you cut it down into small triangles. Dip the sponge gently into the paint, blot 90% of it off, then gently dab. If you use two colors - say black and gray - you can vary the coverage.

This technique can also be used to created chipped paint if you dab on a primary color with more paint on it.