nice job. share your painting technique with us :-)
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nice job. share your painting technique with us :-)
The finish on that hilt is amazing!
Thats awesome. I like the idea for the design.
That's awesome! Te paint job looks way better than my PVC attempts.
Thanks a bunch everyone! I've done a bit of cosplay prop work in the past, and a few of the cons can get pretty strict with their no-metal-props policy, so I've put a bit of effort into making non-metal components look like metal after the paint job.
http://i.imgur.com/EV9q9PVl.jpg
In my personal experience, the weathering is what really sells the look of a fully-painted piece, especially when there's no actual metal to naturally age. Pristine finishes, at best, look fresh-off-the-production-line, and at worst, just looks "fake". Even a wash of a darker color to help shade the piece makes a world of difference. The clear coat has a huge impact, too. In my personal experience, high-gloss finishes seldom work on anything other than mirror-reflective metal. They tend to make other materials look plastic-y, so I'll usually stick with satin and matte finishes. In the picture above, I coated the piece in matte to help age the piece, but the layers of metallic paint underneath still have a soft shimmer with whatever bit of light they're able to catch.
Still trying my hand with these aluminum saber components though. So far, I wouldn't do much more than fill in some grooves and panel lines to accent shadows, but I've got a Pommel 3v2 I'm sitting on in hopes of doing a really worn and beat-up Luke V2.
The very end piece is a 1" PVC plug (not an endcap that slips over 1" pipe, but a plug that fits into a 1" coupler.) Before that is a set of 1" threaded adapters. I use the conduit adapters since they can thread by hand, whereas the plumbing adapters need teflon tape and a wrench to secure completely.
It pretty much just comes down to reading up on dry-brushing techniques. The whole hilt was coated in a base of flat black. From there, I dry-brushed a layer of very dark gray, less dark gray, less dark still - getting lighter each pass. After that, I masked off the "black" areas and started drybrushing layers of metallics - starting with a very dark metallic, and getting lighter each coat. It helps to think of dry-brushing as painting backward - think that you're scratching away the current layer of paint to "reveal" the color currently on your brush. It's why I work from dark-to-light - I think of it as scratching away the darker grime, and revealing the lighter "metal" underneath.
This works because the paint tends to stick to raised edges and skip over flat surfaces, completely skipping recesses. It focuses the pretend-wear on the raised edges that would actually receive the wear in real use.
Afterward, a wash in some darker colors helps sink in any shadows in recessed areas that might've been painted over. It helps a bunch at seams and around screws and such. A quick way to add some shadow is to just lather the piece in black acrylic paints and then wipe off as much as you can with a damp paper towel. And black that's left behind sort of looks like built-up greases in hard-to-reach places. If you wanted something more authentic, you could custom-mix some browns out of opposite colors like red/green, blue/orange, purple/yellow. You'll wind up with a much more natural "dirt" than just black alone. This all depends on how worn you want something to look though. On the opposite end, I've seen some really nice pristine hilts on here making great use of powder coating and/or anodizing to provide the appropriate contrast to keep things interesting.
But yeah, I've got a friend's modified FX Vader hilt I'll be painting in a week or two in a style similar to this hilt. Maybe I can photograph the process and write up a tutorial as I go along?
That hilt doesn't even look like PVC anymore. That is a fabulous finish.
A tutorial of any kind on painting would certainly help me, I've been struggling with painting a PVC shroud for a week now. Do you do anything special as far as a curing/drying process?
A big factor for me is a lack of patience. "Watching paint dry" isn't an old saying for nothing!
Wow!! This is amazing!! Please post a tutorial for the paint job :P
gorgeous work!