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Date: August 29, 2007
Though my plan was to take a couple of days off from R2 work, I just couldn't do it! I'm compelled to finish him, even if it drives me mad.
Don't get me wrong. I really do enjoy working on R2, but with the recent series of setbacks, it's just grown a bit frustrating. Seems like I'm always rolling that same old boulder up the mountain. But after an evening off where I did nothing but watch a couple episodes of "The Dresden Files" and dork around on my computer, I realized I needed to get back to it. That is, if I ever hope to finish him.
Looking ahead, I'll tell you that I'm glad I did. I had a really great evening of painting and tooling around with some really great results. Had there been some major blunder, I'm sure I would feel differently.
Though not pictured, I spent about an hour or so mixing down R2 sounds. I have a 20 minute sound effect track for R2 that I got from a fellow builder, but upon listening to it, I decided I didn't like parts of it. Some of the sound clips are of different/lower quality than others, and there's also some sound clips in there that don't belong. There's a couple of Chewbacca howls in there, and the occasional R2 "scream". Clearly, the Chewie sound doesn't belong, though some would argue that the scream is legit. Yeah, it's a real R2 sound, but for random background chatter, it just doesn't make sense. The other thing that sort of dissuades me from using the scream on the loop is the fact that a brief video of the droid room at CIV showed ALL of the droids screaming at one time or another. So it's a common entry in a sound loop. Perhaps everyone has this loop. I want mine to be different.
I went through and pulled out all of the low-fi effects, and the ones that didn't belong. Then I went back in and inserted about 10 minutes worth of other random sounds, expressions, and phrases that did not seem to appear anywhere else in the loop. That was fun.
The great news is that buried in all of those sound clips I've got stacked up on my hard drive, I found the BEST R2 sound clip I've ever heard in my life. So fantastic that it will get its own button on my CFIII sound box. I expect to get heavy use out of this when walking around with R2.
While I was plinking away with the sound editor, I also put together shorter clips of the two cantina songs. I had the full versions, which I got from a fellow builder, but I felt that for the casual fan, the full cantina songs aren't that recognizable. So I chopped them down to the "core" of the song, and plan to use those on one button on my CFIII. (these are MP3 format, which may give you some quality loss if you try to up-convert them to wmv.)
I also FINALLY put together a sound clip I've been searching for for a long time. It's the "overload then moan". There's plenty of overloads to be found on the web, but never followed by the moan. Here it is.
If you ask me, the coup of the day was a find at Home Depot. I went there to pick up some more blue painters tape, only to learn that they are now carrying a NEW tape by Scotch. This one is called "Delicate", and has a lower adhesion rating than the previously popular blue painters tape. The problem with that other tape is that I would say about 50% of the time, you end up taking off a bunch of paint with your tape. It's VERY punchy stuff, and does not offer predictable results. At least, not in my experience. Of course, your mileage may vary, depending on what type of resin you're using, what type of primer or paint you're using, etc. But for me, it's about fifty/fifty. So when I learned that there was a new sheriff in town, I couldn't help but jump at the chance to give it a try.
Long story short, the stuff works like an ABSOLUTE charm. I am VERY pleased with the results, and from now on will use this as my "go to" masking tape for all of my painting needs.
And it could not have come at a better time, as I'm now faced with a bunch of painting chores that require some non-trivial masking.
The painting started out easily enough with some ankle details, and one of the holo projectors. Keep in mind that I'm shooting for the ANH "Tantive IV" paint job, which includes the multi-colored holo-eyes. Blue bases, and black cones. The pieces you see here received two coats of purple and two coats of blue before this picture was taken.
I strategized for a bit about how to best paint the ankle details. Although my original plan was to mask off the silver and then just blast the blue onto the unexposed parts, an analysis of the pieces revealed that a better technique was to spray the blue down, then mask off the blue parts, and respray the silver. The masking of the blue nub and recess is much easier than masking around them.
And the results prove that I was right. This is one of the pieces in the above photo after it had been masked and blasted with silver paint. I'm using an off the shelf silver paint by Dupli-Color. Not my favorite brand of paint, and it does go on pretty thick, but it will do the job. I cannot say I'm 100% happy with the Dupli-Color, but it does the job. I was really just in an experimenting mood last night, so I only did one of the details. The masking is not 100% either, but hey, it's finished. It looks pretty darn good too.
Since I was spraying silver paint, I painted the inside of the main holo eye. I did this by masking off the back side of the eye, and then suspending it on wooden blocks during painting. I wasn't too concerned about overspray onto the front of the eye, as I already had every intention of giving that a bit of a sanding and another coat of blue. And with the discovery of this great new tape, I don't expect to have any problem masking off the silver part during the application of the blue.
The last thing for today was painting the blue on the battery straps. Again, I used the cool new masking tape to carefully mask off the areas that need to be blue. I then did two coats of purple, two coats of blue, and removed the tape. They turned out great. These are now ready for the clear coat.
Overall, a pretty productive and successful day. And not a single thing happened that made me want to throw something at a wall. Now THAT'S progress!!!
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