My New ROTJ

Nothing much new paint-wise, but I dull-coated the dome, mandibles, and lower cheeks. Still have much to do, but I've also been busy acquiring other suit parts. Forgive the dramatic photos, but that's yet another pursuit. Killing two birds with one stone lol!

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Lower half (cell phone pic):

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Looks great bud, you have captured the damage really well, and those 'dramatic' shots look lovely! Fantastic mate, keep up the great work! :)
 
Thanks for the compliments, fellas.

Jayvee - It's hard to tell, but I finally got the smoke visor in the mail. It's not as dark as the green face shields, but it's still pretty dark. I'm interested in knowing what you think of yours. These things aren't as easy to get ahold of as one would think. It took quite a bit of searching for me to find one.

I have to redo the upper cheeks. They didn't turn out dark enough, blue enough, or with as much damage as I wanted. Hopefully I'll be able to get some real paintwork going this weekend. Add that to the ears and rear panels (notice I don't really show the back/sides all that much?)

I forgot to mention that I color-sanded the majority of the helmet. This was necessary mostly because I used spraypaint rather than airbrush, which tends to leave a somewhat textured finish in some places. The color-sand really evened out the paint, and the smoothness was awesome! Applying the dull coat was very quick. This was mostly necessary, again, because of the use of spraypaint (the colors are all satin/semigloss). Like I tell deadland all the time, I'm a car guy, so I believe in sanding (1200/1500/2000) and clearcoating EVERYTHING! The pictures don't do a very good job of highlighting the actual finish of the helmet, particularly the dome.

So between the sanding and dull coating, the helmet looks more like what I would imagine a real helmet would look like. deadland and I have had talks about how the screen-used helmet was painted, and it's doubtful that there is any sealant on any of them. So clear coat, for me, boils down to my personal taste and, above all, protection.

I will add several more coats of the dull coat when I complete the helmet, meaning my lid will be very well protected. My paintwork is about average, I suppose, but nevertheless, I'd like to keep it looking nice. I'm debating whether or not to wetsand the entire lid after the remaining paintwork is finished, but I'm a little leary of two things:

1. Is dull coat even sandable in the first place?

2. Wetsanding/polishing a gloss clear coat makes the surface into a mirror, basically, which is beautiful to behold. But that's not what we're going for with Boba Fett. Will it alter the finish? I know that it won't become as smooth as glass, but at the same time, I don't really know what it will do. Does anyone have any experience with sanding dull coat?

Thanks for looking!
 
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Yea mate, you are certainly not wrong - The smoke black was much harder to find than I thought it would be, but in the end, I was able to find a couple on ebay. The ones I got I think are actually perfect for ROTJ - seems just that right shade, and is about 3mm thick. There is some debate still with what colour was used on ESB in the films - I'm still of the belief that it is green shade 3 - which is a fair bit lighter than the green shade 5. It was definately a green shade 3 in the more recent AOSW exhibit, but is hard to tell in the pics with the grainy lighting and lesser photographs of the movie stills. But my ROTJ smoke black is easily as dark as this, and looks very in line with the exhibit reference pics.. :)

I am glad you mentioned the upper cheek colour - that was the one colour that I thought may have been a touch off. Do be careful going too blue though - I have a big talk about this in my ROTJ thread, and I still feel alot of the blue comes out from the camera flash, and they are actually a dark green/blue with more emphasis actually to the green value. You can bring the blue out in green as blue is one of the two colours that make up green, but you cant bring the green out in blue as blue is a primary colour. But the cheeks definately appear green under some lights, which mean they must have this green value.. hope that makes sense, just something to think about brother.. ;)

All up though, I stick by my initial statement of outstanding work! Peace :)
 
Bored again. Not much new done since the last time I posted.

However, I did finally install the visor permanently, with the guidance of a certain heavyweight around here. No more tape!

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