by Ian A. O'Neill

Eggsplosion of the Egg Star - Scene from Star Wars IV - A New Yolk

The Egg Star model is a silly model that instantly hit me as something that holds within it some silly possibilities. The end result of this modeling project is a simplification of what I had originally intended. I had wanted to create the shot of the retreating rebel crafts with the exploding Egg Star in the background in a forced perspective. The rebel craft were to be made from plastic forks, thus creating an Episode Fork pun, but after constructing an X-Wing entirely out of plastic forks, I found that the rebel craft would overshadow the Egg Star and take away from the yellow spirit. Hence we are left with a recreation of the solo explosion shot. One last bit of composition that I considered was the explosion ring found in the later re-mastered versions. I am a believer of art as a creation at an instant in time, not to be re-mastered, so I opted to not incorporate a blast-wave ring.

The first part made that made it into the final project (see the composition notes above about the rebel craft that didn't fly) was the Egg Star Explosion piece. I debated back and forth about whether to build and paint the Egg Star first then place it into an egg mess, or construct the whole effect and then paint it, taking my chances with the white getting messed up.

I opted for the latter, as I didn't know how I would not mess up the more detailed piece of the Egg Star painting the egg white. The base form of the white is Styrofoam cut to a roughly broken-egg shape. I then roughly puttied up with paper plaster to fill in and give it a fuller body of whiteness. I then placed the Egg Star shells, prepared as one would a normal resin model, onto the form and puttied them onto the whole affair. I left the puttied area uneven to give an uneven once-liquid appearance.

The second part is the yolk. I decided on near spherical for the yolk to get the circular yolk appearance that one usually associates with an egg yolk. Yolks on eggs prepared sunny-side up are not spherical, but I wanted to help get the initial "Hey, that's an egg." pop of a viewer's first view. More over, a hemispherical shape was easier to prepare than a true cooked yolk shape. Again, a foam ball cut in half was covered with paper-plaster, though this time I sanded as smooth as I could.

The last part of the piece is the backdrop. I used a foam board pre-made in black. I left its dimensions as is so as to look almost like a movie screen in dimension.

The explosion piece was based in white with Citadel Primer. The piece is then hand painted with acrylic paints redoing the edges as necessary. The yolk was painted in the same way. The background is the natural black of the foam board with stars painted on by hand. I used the DVD insert to get a feel of how stars should be laid out. I decided to not make another layer of speck stars as it would have gotten very tedious and would have been in a finer detail than the Egg Star itself and taken the focus away from that part.

The future of the piece: I have received permission from my wife to hang this piece up in the family room.

Image: Left side view

Image: Bottom

Image: Right side

Image: Top

Image: Entire display

Image: Overall, left side