Painting, at long last. And a long post to celebrate it, haha.
This particular process will be ongoing for quite some time and probably encompass multiple posts as different parts need to be painted at different points in the build. I’m trying to paint things as they get put on so that they spend less time wandering about where they could get dirty/scratched while also not painting over places that will need to have additional parts attached. I made the mistake in a couple of places of painting spots that shouldn’t be, and then having to use a scraper to remove the paint in order to glue over it. For the most part, though, it was just a lot of painters tape.
In order to get the most out of the early fall weather while it was still warm enough to paint outdoors I tried to get as many parts done as soon as possible for it. This consisted of the body, legs, horseshoes (decorations for the top of the leg), body trim, and various detail pieces.
Before I did this though the first thing I did was pick my color scheme and then test the paints.
The above shows my first test on the black, orange, and silver paints. This is the first time I’m mentioning it here, but pretty much since the get-go I’ve debated whether to build a true R2-D2 or to do something more custom for myself. Well, the painting is what finalized it in my mind and I decided to go custom!
Technically rather than an R2 astromech droid from star wars, what I’m building is an R7 astromech. In the Star Wars universe there is a whole series of R unit droids, just like there are multiple iPhones. However, according to the in-universe lore pretty much everything after R2 is quite bad, which is how they explain later R units existing, but Luke keeps R2 anyway. The R7 is the first one after the R2 to actually be a useful droid although I chose it mainly because it looks badass. I found some fan art online of a black and green R7 unit and decided that I loved the scheme – except it should be orange, and not green. This is the same color scheme that Poe Dameron the amazing rebel pilot from the newest star wars trilogy has his X-Wing fighter painted and I love the look of it.
So with this new layout and color scheme in mind I’ll need three paints: black, silver, and orange. The black and orange were pretty simple to find. I went for a matte color because you can use wax rub and buff afterwards to give a really nice metallic effect to the plastic as I’ve seen other R2 builders do. The silver, however, was much harder. First of all, the paint I tried was much more silver than it was metallic – it just didn’t have the correct sheen to be mistaken for metal at all. I tried a second silver paint, which wasn’t great, but lacking options and wanting to get as much done as possible I settled for. This is the silver you’ll see in the following images of the parts laid out.
At this point, since I had decided to build an R7 I cut out the correct shape for the skin and glued it over a second layer of the skin I put on the body. The second layer of skin had no detail on it, it was simply to cover blemishes in the first caused by the glue melting through it. The 3rd layer seen here taped on is the outline and detail that creates the texture of the R7 body.
Once that was dry I taped off the parts of R2 that shouldn’t be black. This process takes substantially longer than you would think, especially for the R7 style of look because it has much more color variation on the front and back than the standard R2 does. I then brought the body and other pieces outside and set them up.
One thing that was a pain for this part of the process is that I had to ensure that the surface was completely clean, but leaving the parts outdoors meant there was always some threat of some dirt/dust getting blown onto them by the wind. Inevitably this happened in a few spots and I had to touch it up, but mostly I was able to simply spray a couple of layers of paint to cover blemishes.
I also painted some of the silver detail parts that would need to go onto the legs in the not-distant future, since I was trying to get as much painting done at once as possible.
However, upon closer inspection these parts did not come out well at all. You see, these detail pieces are all painted resin and not the same polystyrene as I’ve been using for the rest of R2. For some reason the paint did not stick well to resin at all, and in many places left a lumpy/bumpy texture to it.
I would be tempted to say that this was something wrong with the resin casting itself, but the piece directly next to it was made from the same mold from the same seller and dried in the same conditions. I wasn’t going to keep this paint job anyway, but as I moved the pieces about I also found out that the paint was rubbing off of the parts. And I do mean rubbing – it didn’t take much at all to remove the paint from them. As a result I decided I’d have to soak the parts in paint thinner and scrub this silver off of them and try again with a new formula.
It turns out, though, finding out what paint WILL work on resin plastic isn’t as easy as a google search. There’s a special mix of Krylon called Krylon Fusion that will, but it comes in a very limited set of colors and none of them are chrome. I actually called a couple of paint stores to no avail, until someone offered to reach out to their supplier at Krylon and get back to me. When they did get back to me the Krylon rep said I should use an automotive primer – CP199 – on the parts and then once that was on I could use pretty much any paint on top of it. Since I was in the automotive store anyway, I went ahead and got an automotive chrome which was a much more realistic metal compared to the “metallic” silvers I’d gotten prior.
After testing the new paint and seeing it come out a much nicer chrome color as well as sticking better, I decided I could use it for all of the detailed parts that required silver over again.
This is all of the extra pieces laid out for me to paint them on a tarp. The horeshoes are in the second picture hanging up to allow me to get at them from all sides.
This second round of painting occurred some time after the first, since I had to research the new paint to use for the silver and do some touch up on detail pieces to ensure they were ready for painting. As such, I had time to assemble R2 with just the black body, before the orange stripes were added. It makes for a good before and after picture (which I’ll put at the end), but for chronology’s sake here is just the black body with the legs.
You can see that all black would be nigh on impossible to do on an R2 and still have it come out looking good. It just loses all its detail since you can’t see the shadows which give it depth and make it pop. I’m glad I had already decided on the orange at this point – if I had gotten here and gone for an all black droid in the style of the Empire I’d have been very disappointed in invisible all the detail is.
Here is the same angle with the painters tape removed.
All in all I was pretty happy with the taping, it didn’t seem like much/any paint bled at all, and where it did it would be pretty easy to touch up.
The next part of the paint process was to paint on the orange stripes where required, which was much easier said than done. The taping itself took something like two hours to do, and I didn’t do a good enough job at all. I completely underestimated the amount of wind and how far the orange speckles would go. In the end I needed to touch up a not insignificant portion of the black to remove the speckling.
This left me with the outlines in place and so I then needed to glue the black pieces onto the remaining white areas (or in the cases of the long rectangles on the sides, vice versa). The following is the before and after of this process on the front of R2.
In the second picture where the lighting is better you can see how the bottom of the body has picked up some orange from when I wasn’t careful enough. I touched this up the next day, and in spite of it I was very happy with the way the orange looks. In darker lights the orange takes on an almost crimson hue, which I don’t mind in the least either. All in all, at this point I was very pleased with the progress being made.
One last photo on this post below showing the back missing a panel, this illustrates the difference and gives you an idea of how adding the panels creates some depth in the detail. I feel like the added depth is really important as just doing the flat colors is quite tacky looking.
