Painted Traps

[DroidHunter]

I am in the process of working on my ATA build, and I am of course chronicling it in the appropriate location. But I have a question about the traps and thought I would post here. I wanted to have a fully painted helmet as opposed to using decals. For the tube stripes I grabbed a set of Trooperbay's hand-painted templates. However, the rest is being done by free-hand with a little help from my trusty roll of making tape. How do these look so Far?

 

I have two questions: (1) Is the black outer line too thick? They seemed a little heavy to me, but no more so than some of the decals/pinstripes I have seen floating around. Probably too thick for some, but my question is whether they are sufficient for ANH stunt approval.  (2) The trap on the back of the helmet has what appears to be a slight clockwise tilt. But it really does not. I followed the line on the back of the cap, which as you can see has a curve to it on the ATA helmet. Any problems with this? My eye thought following the helmet detail was better than following a non-existent straight line.

 

 

[DizzyStormtrooper[501st]]

looks fine, couldve fooled me if you said they were decals

[Fabio Fontoura]

looks fine, couldve fooled me if you said they were decals

Idd, thats some fine hand painting

[rugbyrat]

Looks great.

[Artstar]

Nice!

[gazmosis[501st]]

You are doing a great job. Your location/placement is fine. The outline is very borderline on thick. I definitely would NOT go ANY thicker.

[maxsteele[TK]]

Would you mind writing up a tutorial on how you hand-painted these?  I know you said you used masking tape, but I'd like to know how and when you used the tape and the method of painting.

[DroidHunter]

Will do. I have a little Christmas gathering tonight and a birthday party tomorrow but then I'll write it up.

[DroidHunter]

Ok, nothing fancy here. I started off by doing a simple search for Stormtrooper helmets and used one of the images to print and cut out a basic shape for the traps. It took a little time playing with the dimensions of the jpeg after pasting it into a Word document, but it didn't need to be perfect. After that I printed the page, cut out the traps and tacked them on my helmet with a piece of tape. I used a pencil to outline the shape. My traps were a little short, so I traces the bottom line, then moved the cutout higher and traced the rest. Then it was a matter of marking off with blue painters tape and painting the black. Once you have the black are painted, remove the tape right away or else it really started to get gummy.

 

For the next step, I simply overlapped blue tape over the edges of the black. If you use a nice bright light (I have one of those silly lights that fit over you head so it is hands free) you can see through the blue tape. This lets you decide how thin or thick to make the black layer.paint the grey the same as the black, always starting on the tape and brushing inward. To get the soft curve along the top, just make a gentle swoosh with the brush in the corner. Once done, again remove the tape right away. I also find you can use a tooth pick to scratch away major imperfections within about 10 to 15 minutes. No paint thinner needed. And done! Hope that makes sense. I'll add to this when I do the cheeks and grill lines.

 

[maxsteele[TK]]

Thanks for that!  My main concern with masking was getting the curve at the top edges of the black and gray.  

 

I found that even after the Testors paint dries, you can use a toothpick to shape the paint.  Any little pieces you don't want can just be scraped away.  I had done a masking of a trapezoid on a spare piece of ABS.  The top edges had very obvious points to them.   After it dried, I scraped the curve at the top edges with a toothpick.

 

What I wasn't sure about was how to get that curve with the gray, since I'd be scraping gray and black at the same time.  The 'swoosh' you show will most likely work for me.

 

I am getting the full template kit from Trooperbay, as I want to paint the tube stripes as well.  The template kit also comes with a vinyl cover for painting the grill lines on the rear traps.

 

http://trooperbay.com/stormtrooper-helmet-masking-templates/

Edited December 18, 2013 by maxsteele

[rugbyrat]

Bill,

 

Pretty close to the way I painted mine.  I just used tape for the entire process, and did not use a shaped trapezoid to draw lines.  Nice job!

[Batphobic]

Yeah that looks really slick. Will have to try my hand at this when I get to this point. Thanks for the tip.