CultTVman: Carl Reinisch's Battle Droid


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Carl Reinisch's Battle Droid
	When I first saw the battle droids in The Phantom Menace, I thought to myself, "Now there is something I would like to see as a model!" and ERTL (bless their hearts) has released the STAP with Battle Droid kit which was the basis for my model. The droid goes together easily with parts fitting and aligning well. I modified the kit in a few areas so that I could give it a more natural looking pose when it was completed. The elbow joint was changed so that in addition to bending up and down it could also rotate. The finger joints were also modified so that they could close more realistically around the blaster rifle. The kit is engineered so that the head can move up and down but I modified the neck joint so that it can also turn from left to right, thereby making it possible to give the model a more candid pose. The plastic antenna shafts were removed and replaced with thin brass rods to give a more realistic appearance.
	The blaster rifle was built from scratch using about 75 pieces of round, square and flat styrene. A search of the 'net had yielded a line drawing of the blaster rifle that I used a blueprint. Other pictures found on the net were used in the painting and weathering process for both the rifle and the droid..

Once all the droid pieces were assembled they were painted overall with a color loosely based on Radome Tan. I then over sprayed the pieces from underneath with a slightly darker shade of tan and used a lighter shade of tan to spray the pieces from above. This technique was used to simulate the effect of the sun bleaching and weathering the paint finish. Panel lines were enhanced with a thin wash of mid-brown. Areas of wear were simulated by drybrushing steel onto the areas I thought would be affected and oil stains/leaks were added by repeated washes of gloss brown. I sprayed small areas of steel surrounded by flat black to represent the results of blaster burns. The entire droid was then over sprayed with a 50-50 combination of flat clear and gloss clear The blaster rifle was painted over-all with a metallic black and dry brushed with steel to simulate wear and tear. The droid was then mounted onto a base that had been generously donated to me by one of the members of the local hobby club. I thoroughly enjoyed building this kit – so much so that I have plans for 3 more (I am going to have to try to build at least one of them stock!) -- Carl Reinisch

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