This is my first post and my first time painting a model. Comments and/or suggestions are welcome.

Firstly, welcome!

Nice ship. Thanks for sharing.

Welcome aboard! We're happy to have you here.

I'd like to know about how you felt painting your Firespray. Was it easier or harder than you expected? Are you happy with the way it turned out? Is there something you wanted to do to it that you were unable to, either due to lack of equipment or ability? There are some fantastic people in this community who can provides tips if they know what you're trying to achieve, so specific questions can really drive the discussion.

By the way, the photos of your model seem really small and oriented 90 degrees counterclockwise. Is anyone else seeing the same thing?

Thank you guys. I'm not too sure why the photo's are so small or sideways. Probably partly because they are crappy phone pics.

As per your questions, I enjoyed the process. The Firespray was pretty easy with all the lines and what not. It ended up being easier then I thought it would be. I only planned on doing a little bit here and there, but as things went well I got more ambitious. I'm not completely happy with the end product. The round part on the top of the back doesn't look as "clean" as I would like. There's some colour overlapping here and there. It did give me the ambition to do a Yt-2400 next.

I would have liked to do some of the finer details on the back. Unfortunately due to lack of small brushes and a steady hand I decided to skip it. So are there some tricks to keeping your hand steady with the fine details? And are there brushes that small? Also, when wanting to do a total repaint, would I be better off doing a base coat first?

There's a lot of tutorials available on the web (esp. Youtube) and tons of info can be parsed from these forums. A lot of the tutorials for Imperial Assault minis will be equally applicable to X-Wing. With that in mind...

Unfortunately, practice is the biggest contributor to steady painting. There ARE some things that will help, though.

• Eat something! Trying to paint on an empty stomach won't help.
• Tone down the caffeine & sugar. Coffee, pop, energy drinks, etc. will NOT keep your hands steady.
• Good lighting. If you're straining & squinting to see what you're doing, the tension will translate to your painting.
• Rest. Painting fine details when you're stressed, overtired, distracted, etc. won't help either.
• Drybrushing. A lot of times, just a little drybrushing can really make details pop on a model, and so can...
• Washes. A commonly used one for X-Wing minis is Games Workshop's Nuln Oil Shade. It pools and collects in the recesses after you brush it on and simulates shadows on the model (broadly speaking)
• Masking. A roll of painter's tape (or something like Tamiya's model masking tape) can help keep lines straight and surfaces clean. This person used thin masking tape to allow him to pain the spirals on Luke's X-Wing to simulate the paint job from the trench run.

Yes, there are certainly brushes that small. You may not find them easily, but craft stores may have them, art supply stores may have them, and hobby shops that sell models, trains, and such will almost certainly have them if they carry paints. Games Workshop has pretty decent brushes that range from about $6-$12 US. Many model & paint companies have a proprietary line of brushes, though they'll likely be more expensive.

As far as a base coat, it really depends on who you ask, and what ship you're repainting. A lot of the pro-level painters on these forums just paint over the existing paint, but they do so with many layers of very thin paint to keep from obscuring details like panel lines. Others strip the model first and re-prime it to start over if it's a model with shallow details that might otherwise be lost.