Stencils

I wish someone has the knowledge to make these stencils as seen on the RPF by Trooper Trent
the RPF and his tutorial here ROTJ V2 Lightsaber Paint Tutorial

To create stencils for painting the helmet and armor etc. It would be awesome !!!

Maybe wishful thinking or food for your thought for you graphic designers out there

Wow, are you joking or serious?

Check out the stickied threads on the helmet and armor sections and you shall receive. And it's even 100% free to use.



/Kalle

Tottofagrin, yes, there are stencils/templates available in the helmet forum. They're excellent and I can't imagine how many
hours of painstaking research and graphics work went into creating them. They allow members to print or trace them and
create their own accurate damage patterns.

I think what BobaKen was talking about are those machine cut vinyl stencils as seen in the ROTJ lightsaber project
he linked to. I think those would be pretty amazing, if they were practical.

Those lightsaber stencils are only one layer "deep" seeing as how the only color he's using is flat black. With Fett,
even just considering the left ear on the ESB helmet for example, you'd need a set of masks for: white, gray, and red.
Expand that to the whole helmet and that would be a pretty hefty set! Not to mention any set of these masks would
have to be designed for a particular "make" of helmet, and then they'd only fit that helmet. There would be no ability
to scale or resize them. The same would go for the armor, too.

Eric, Thank you for pointing out the other requirements needed for the stencils, Again, I did not realize, what was needed as I have never
painted a helmet. I was basically thinking about the layers in the back of the helmet eg : main general areas, I tried to use the provided stencils
and tried tracing it and what was traced was not the same as the stencil itself, so, I scrapped the project. Lol.

yea i tried it once. Doesnt work lol the curves of the helmet wont allow the vinyl stencil to conform to the shape of the helmet properly with the backing on it and they wrinkle and bunch..and even after taking the clear off trying to reposition and fix them just distorts them...so it just wont work properly. I didnt even like the way it worked for the kill stripes. I tried it and wasnt happy with the result. I got better results with blue masking tape. A member did use this method for the back panels and it worked pretty good, but dont think he posted any further progress. My guess is since the back panels are flat with only 1 curve, you CAN do it for the back panels. But like Eric said, you'd need quite a few and it would end up being very costly.

Fettfullofdollars does an interesting method by printing the stencils on waterslide decal sheets and painting over that. that is an excellent way to get the damage near perfect, but only works with the topical method. But as im sure you know, his paintups are amazingly good

Haha the stencils are tricky Ken. you need to be sure everything is lined up and stays that way as you trace. Its very difficult to trace it EXACTLY the way the stencils are. they will always tend to be slightly off but nothing youd be able to tell, even putting them side by side. Its a tedious process to say the least lol

Thank you for the detailed info Lou . Man. I did another test and it was a PIA :facepalm... Lol

Nice to hear that Fettfullofdollars uses decals, would have never thought of that, and Yes, among others that do a very good paint jobs including Eric and yourself, too name a few

Well it was a just a thought haha !!!

Stenciling can be a chore! But if you want things to be as close to accurate as they can be, it's necessary.

Lou, I didn't even get into the curvature aspect of things as that's a whole other ball of wax.

BK, what kind of issues were you having with tracing? Since I do my paint-ups topically, I don't really worry about
getting every tiny curve and line perfect. I get the shapes down to about 95% and use reference pics while I'm painting
to add all the finer details.

Eric, I got ticked and I am having a close friend paint it for me. It was too frustrating and working 10 hour days with 1 day off, doesn't help :facepalm
I am only going to do the armor and gauntlets. I have primed the stuff, but it is as far as I got...lol.

Thanks again Eric, for trying to offer the assistance, I am sure, something else would pop up I will seek advise at that point. My only issues are my eyes is not as good as they use to be and glasses are okay, but, trying to wear glasses and removing it, actually messes with my eyes, after effects as I don't wear it on a daily basis.

Here as circled in the picture was my biggest issue of tracing

Oh that right panel. . . yeah that's one of the most detailed areas on the ESB.
It's an eye crosser!

That's the panel I'm currently working on. Its also the panel I started with. Never painted a Fett helmet before and I'm pretty sure after this is done I never will again.

When I started I just really found it hard to grasp how to do it and this panel didn't help much. The problem I had was I thought I needed to trace each little bit from each color and mask it all off and spray. So I was really unhappy with how this panel came out and now that I have the a good amount of the rest done I decided to come back to this and touch up/finish it.

If I were to do this again (I won't):
I'm doing this layered btw

1. Spray silver over full panel
2. Stencil on the OUTLINE of the damage line that goes diagonally down creating the "triangle" of bare metal silver
3. Mask off the "triangle" area of the lower left side of that panel
4. Spray Gray
5. Stencil on the OUTLINE of the damage line that goes diagonal but only what is Concrete colored and stencil on the larger Concrete places on the right side and bottom of panel.
6. Mask again.
7. Spray Concrete
8. Stencil inner edges of Concrete damage line
9. Mask again
10. Spray Green.

Then everything else would get stenciled on and handpainted. I tried to do way too much with the mask. I would have been better off to just mask and spray a few larger chunks of gray damage in that silver area to align things and use as keys when handpainting the rest, but instead I tried to do it ALL masked off. I would constantly lose where I was at and that would mess with my mind about what I was looking at.

I am actually working on fixing the damage line and when I am done am going to sand off the silver "triangle", mask, respray it and the handpaint on the damage in that area. This is also due to the masking fluid I was using damaging the silver paint some. I don't know why but the Windsor and Newton has just been a thorn in my side for far too long and has gone in the trash. I now use the Humbrol applying it the same way I did the W&N and have had no problems at all.

So long story short...when I paint the next helmet (never) I will have a better understanding going in that will save me a lot of time on that one (unh uh...nope)