Star Wars Style Modeling

This is a scratchbuilt model of a freighter featured in the Star Wars novel Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn.  The design is inspired by the ship as drawn in the comic book adaptation of the novel.  

It was a very fun model to build.  This picture is untouched except for adding a faint glow to the engines in post.  I composited it onto a star field made using a similar technique as the stars seen in the Star Wars movies; I painted some aluminum foil black, pricked a thousand tiny holes through it and lit it from behind.  The effect is convincing, I think.  

Here is the same model flying through hyperspace.  Again, I mimiced the original effects from the 1970s by putting a light in the end of a tube of crumpled aluminum foil.  Tinted it blue in post and added some blur effects to get it to look like motion.

I've been really enjoying model building again.  You may see more of this sort of thing in the future.