| C-3PO (ATTACK
OF THE CLONES)
PROJECT #454 "I am programmed to understand humans! What does that mean? That means I am in charge here!" Preamble: Factory-issue protocol droids are supposed to be clean and shiny and appealing to the eye. Problem is, C-3PO isn't your average factory-issue protocol droid. He was originally little more than a skeletal frame built from discarded droid parts, but eventually he received a complete body shell—albeit one that was clearly pieced together from old, rusty body coverings from multiple sources. Under any other circumstances, C-3PO would have been useless, given his purported role as an ambassador of etiquette—how could he be expected to serve royalty when he's covered in tarnish and gunk? As luck would have it, the Lars family on Tatooine didn't really need a pristine, sparkling droid on their moisture farm—just a loyal, hard-working machine who could tend to the moisture vaporators in a binary language that they understood. I probably wouldn't have done this project at all if I hadn't first tackled the much larger model kit of C-3PO, painting him as he appears in Attack of the Clones. After I put in the requisite studying to learn what colors all his body panels were supposed to be, I realized how inadequate the Hasbro action figures were. (The first version had removable body panels so he was way too bulky. The later Droid Factory edition that could swap heads with a Battle Droid was a much better sculpt, but it still lacked the proper colors.) Anyway, I wanted to do a regular action figure version of poor, rusty C-3PO as well, and see how well I could reproduce this level of detail on a much smaller scale. Construction: I started with the Revenge of the Jedi version of C-3PO, which is arguably the best action figure sculpt of the character available. I knew I'd be putting a lot of coats of paint on this toy, and I was worried about losing some of the finer details since he already had both aluminum electroplating as well as a coat of laquer to begin with. What I really wanted was to strip the toy down to the original plastic and go from there, so after doing some research as to the best way to accomplish this, I settled on giving him a soak in some Windex,. This didn't require any scrubbing or scraping, which I liked, and didn't damage the styrene at all. After about two days, this nicely dissolved the vacuum metalized coating but left the paint on his eyes and waist intact; a third day of soaking took care of that, too. This enabled me to start with the original, completely unpainted plastic, with all the details of the original sculpt still crisp and clear. (Did you know this toy had little vertical lines in his eyes? I had no idea. I actually fixed a handful of sculpting issues, too, which were mainly due to the limitations of what Hasbro can do at this scale. I carved out the gaps between his elbow joints and the pistons on his arms, as well as the ones on his neck. I also worked on his hands, building him some new thumbs, and whittled away at his hips a little to make them more defined. For this project, I painted his body parts different colors depending on what color droid those body coverings came from (dark grey for his left arm and pelvis, white for his left bicep and left thigh, black for his left shoulder and left calf, and grey for everything else). Then I went back and drybrushed the toy with silver paint to make it look as if most of the paint had worn away and the bare metal was exposed. Then I switched to acrylics and gave him a black paint wash to dirty him up a bit (I applied a small, round sticker to his chest and painted over it, and then removed it afterwards to create the spot where his restraining bolt would have gone). Finally, I drybrushed him with some tan paint to simulate the dust and dirt that accumulated on his body in the arid desert terrain. Comments: The official version of C-3PO is missing a lot of color, but I don't really don't blame Hasbro for not coming up with a more accurate edition of C-3PO from this film. He requires a lot of layers of paint applications to make him look like he does in the movie, which I'm sure is cost prohibitive, particularly at this tiny scale. (On the other hand, they probably could have done this with the 12" scale Action Collection series, but for some reason they never did a large-scale C-3PO figure from Attack of the Clones.) |
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This Page Created 8/10/2010
Last Update: 8/23/2010
©2010 Inspiration Studios
C-3PO™ is the property of Lucasfilm
I don't think there's a point in my life
when I haven't been confused.