Dirty Worn Paint and Open Technology

George Lucas was basically a Fast and Furious, Top Gear hot rod racing guy into fast cars and customising them. He wanted technology and vehicles in the Star Wars universe to be open panel and bonnet so all could see how they could be taken apart, maintained and how they worked.

He wanted realism, dirt, damaged, worn, aged environments and equipment not looking brand new.

Thus the painting on my props had to look dirty and worn.

First Technique – Patchy Paint



The first technique was to apply mottled paint so not just one colour by black streaks and patches of metallic paint to appear like worn patches.

2nd Technique – Use of Salt to Make Flaked and Scratched Paint

Whilst I did not want the paint to really flake off as it was just black plastic underneath, I did want to fake it so it looked like metal underneath.

As said the aim was to make things look worn with painted metal that has scratches, dents, rust patches, scraped off paint and flakes.

A trick I learned was to use salt masking. What was done was to:

• First paint the item with its normal colour, I this case patchy military green.
  

• Over this spray metallic patches, in my cases dirty silver or gold, maybe with rust spray.
  
  
• This will be the new undercoat that will be the patches.
  
  
• I then mixed water and salt to make a salt paste.

• The paste was then flicked onto the prop onto those new metallic patches, to make splodges, patches, streaks and lumps of salt paste.
  
  
• This needs to be random.
  
  
• Then leave this to dry.
  
  
• Then dry respray the original colour ie in this case green with black patches to cover the un salt masked metallic patches.
  
  
• Once dry rub off the salt with wire brushes, scrapers, hand, finders, steal wire etc.

• This leaves the much more realistic flaked paint and scratches.

3rd Technique – Adding 3D Rust Texture

 To further distress the prop, I added texture rust by applying spray and super glue to stick sand onto the prop. Once dry I sprayed Dirty Down Rust spray paint wash onto this along with some khaki and faint black.

4th Technique – Dusting the Prop

The last technique to be applied was the simplest.



When doing my photo shoot on the cream-coloured sand and gravel outside the Heartlands housing complex which was used as the base for my Tatooine photos, I decided just to grab handfuls of this dust and throw it over the prop and use my brush of brush on the sand and dust.

What had been missing in dirtying down was simply to apply dirt.