May 2020
In the first instalment of “A Garage For A Y-Wing” I had realized I hated what I had just put together. The problem was I had simply built a box. And I used a lot of Project Bricks to do it. Seriously, a cardboard box with some paint on it would have saved me time and expense.
What I wanted to accomplish was to make a sort of homage to the the Rebel technicians that we see on Yavin, huddled over their controls. I love lighting my displays and it came down to just wanting a couple of figures lit from below, like in the Yavin scenes. To do that all I would need is a smaller room that would fit just three figures, and a small window to see them through. In this case Power of the Force Fleet Troopers. I measured out that footprint, made sure the window would still fit and redid the walls.
This was much better! The smaller space also made the two sets of LED string lights brighter. I used an orange set under the consoles and a purple set of Halloween lights to light up the room itself. There are two consoles that I repurposed from a couple of EVE-99 figures and the third is from a Star Trek toy (no idea which toy exactly, we don’t hock the The Trek here) that was sent to me from our friend, Chris Leddy of Sixth Scale Scavengers. I shoved the purple lights inside of an old coffee maker spill tray and it gave just the right amount of light.
I also added a ceiling to the room, which I hadn’t originally planned on. I thought I would keep it open for photo opportunities but covering the room meant the lighting inside was brighter. The smaller footprint of the room also meant having a ledge/balcony beside it (and on top of the garage). I decided to add a couple of gun placements on the roof and this “balcony.”
I had seen a really cool sketch in the Art of Rogue One book that I took as inspiration (I really liked the idea of an astromech droid being connected to the laser dish) and began collecting parts and greeblies. I also used some LEGO that I scavenged from my son’s old LEGO box.I was pleasantly surprised with the gun placements and ended up spending more time on them than the rest of the project.
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Meanwhile I was second guessing the garage walls that started this entire project. Like I mentioned in my last article, I had wanted to use some cool looking packaging for the garage walls. I spray painted them grey, hot glued a string of LED lights and added a few tools and parts. It looked pretty good, not exactly what I had in my head but cool enough to continue. My thinking was that the material was scavenged metal that the rebels were using within the brick walls.
But when I put the entire project in it’s place on the Rebel base diorama it stuck out like a sore thumb. I mean, it served it’s purpose by letting me create a control room that didn’t take up space on the shelf but the yellowish coloured bricks and the grey packing material walls just didn’t look right together from the outside. So I added bricks to the outside of the walls to give the appearance that the garage had been added to the existing architecture when the Rebels moved in. I think it looks better now but…..
It still sticks out! The solution is to just transform the entire top shelf of the diorama with more and more brick walls but that’s a huge job (and expense because I’m cheap). I’ve decided that I’ll continue to add walls a little bit at a time, and maybe try using regular foam packing or pink foam insulation and make cuts into the material to simulate brick. I’ve never done that before so for now, the garage stays as it is.
Mike Tarkin.com 