Making a Color Shifting Multichrome Pit Droid

Here you can see some of my progress as I build the Pit Droid for my remote controlled Pit Droid driving kart. The files I’ve printed out for my Star Wars Pit Droid are located at this link. The files are amazing and are well worth the money. Very easy to print and assemble.

So the first part of finishing 3d prints is the whole (endless) sand-prime-sand phase. This is my pile of parts after a few rounds of finishing. I’ve printed out all the parts to make two Pit Droids here. One is for me, and one will be for my husband. Painting his Pit Droid will be a first for him! 🙂

The cool thing about Pit Droids is that you can paint them whatever color scheme you prefer. There is no ‘correct’ way to do it. My husband decided to go with a more screen-accurate paint scheme of tans and rust colors. Me? Since my Pit Droid will be driving around, I wanted it to really be eye catching. I decided to throw caution to the wind and go with a metallic color shifting scheme. I’ve never painted something like this with these colors, so I really had no idea how it would turn out.

I started by airbrushing everything with a gloss black base (Spaz Sticks Gloss Black). The paint was easy to work with using my airbrush. It’s enamel-based, so it needs a lot of ventilation when working with it- and decent PPE! I wore a fresh N95 mask while I was working. By the time I was done, the outside of my mask was a very dark gray. Scary to think that all of that would have been in my lungs had I not been wearing the mask!

Once the black was on the parts, it was just a matter of applying very light layers of the color shifting paint until I achieved the look I wanted.

I kind of played around with layering different colors on different parts, just putting things together and evaluating if I liked how they looked together or not. Once I was happy with everything, I assembled everything and took the Pit Droid outside for some photos in the natural light. I was still waiting for an aluminum rod to arrive, which is why my Pit Droid is headless in these pics.

Photos don’t do the paint justice! The colors change at different angles, almost as if it is alive.

Now that the main base coat of colors is complete, I will be adding weathering to the finish to make it look as if it’s been out in the elements for a while. It helps to give the little guy some character. Stay tuned!