Imperial Transtar 1220 series Night Hawk

The game tells us this is an "attrition fighter" armed with six spatterguns - but the model itself is pretty generic, so you could use it for almost anything. The photo above shows two varieties of the Night Hawk - on the left, the "original edition" metal model, and on the right, the "second edition" plastic model.

What we've done here is pretty basic. Following the technique outlined in Part One of this series:

• We prime the ships black with spray paint (Model Master FS 17038 Flat Black), making sure to cover everything
• Then we lightly drybrush with silver paint

This gives us metallic-looking ships with lots of apparent detail, due to all the black in the crevices and recesses. But beyond this...

• We paint the wings a strong color, to add contrast and interest to the basic metallic look - in this case, a very deep blue.
• We paint the cockpit black, to make it look as if you are seeing "into" the interior
• The plastic Hawks have a dome on the back deck that has some resemblance to R2D2... we paint this with a light touch of gold, making it stand out just a little.
• For extra credit, we take a very fine brush and carefully paint some yellow into the recesses at the stern, making the engine exhaust "glow."
• For the plastic Hawks, we paint some red into some recesses at the bow which we've decided are lasar gunports. The metal Hawks have big gun muzzles up front, which we paint gold.
• To give contrast to the metallic areas, we paint the wings and canopies with gloss clear to make them shiny.

Except for the detail painting of the gunports and engine exhausts, none of this requires any fancy painting techniques. A silver drybrush is about the simplest form of drybrush there is - just try it, you'll see. And these ships turn out just fine for the gaming table.