Showing posts with label paint. Show all posts
Showing posts with label paint. Show all posts

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Bag, Cat No Longer Together

Over the weekend I was out and about, going to Home Depot and checking out the paint selection. I had already gathered a handful of paint chips from Lowe's, looking for the perfect R5 red-orange but was unsuccessful. At Home Depot they had a color that was closer to what I was after but I think I'll still need to experiment. There's a Behr color called "Red Hot" that might be an excellent base coat. Honestly I won't really know until I paint something and put it against the rest of the droid.

This is where I spilled the beans. I was keeping it to myself the same reason I keep most projects like this to myself -- I don't want people harassing me about how it's going. The wife was with me at Home Depot and, though distracted by the Christmas junk for a while, she caught me comparing reds and oranges in the paint department.

All this time I'd been disguising my research on droids as assistance for Tim's custom droid. It was a half truth - I really am sharing everything I discovered with Tim. I can spend most of the day looking around at all kinds of info and report back to him rather informed, concise packets of data... but I was also looking for my own info on droids.

Ah well - turns out she was OK with it. I just have to do some major cleaning in the basement to make room for the workspace.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

R2 Blue

Not many people seem to realize this -- R5-D4 is just R2-D2 with a different head and some panels painted red. Generally speaking, everything else is the same. That said there are a number of parts that need to be painted blue. Unfortunately, to get the color correct is not just a matter of finding a can of spray paint at Lowe's.

The R2 Builder's Group has numerous discussions on how to make that perfect blue hue with a combination of gold, silver and metallic purple as a base coat and a candy-coat, semi-transparent royal blue. This method gets expensive fast if you're just looking to do one droid on your own. Builder Kelly Krider came up with a way to achieve this look with store-bought spray paint, and since I'm making R5-D4 in all his Tatooine debut glory I don't really care how pristine the underlying paint job is. Granted it'll come out looking awesome, but as one builder said -- no need to waste money on perfect paint jobs when you're just going to weather it.

Here's a pic of someone's R2 head using the Krider Method: