Droids Custom TIE Pilot: Finished colors!

by Bill Cable
on 2023-11-08, 08:26:18

Last week I showed off the beginnings of my colors for my Droids TIE Pilot. I'm happy to report I got a lot more done in the past 7 days. So much done, in fact, that the colors are finished! Let me take you through things step-by-step.

In my first "session" I colored the main character himself, along with the beginning work on the TIE Fighter wing. I did my best to make the shiny armor elements look shiny, and the cloth elements look less shiny. I got tons of use from the Photoshop splatter brush on the vehicle, which I think always gives a lived-in texture that fits.

Also note the wing panels are a straight up rip-off of the Kenner toy. Or is that an homage...

In the next session I worked on the rest of the TIE Fighter, shadows on the wings, and finished the A-Wing. It was kinda funny... I had multiple people, including my wife, ask last week why the A-Wing had "legs." I knew they were contrails all along, so I didn't see that at all. Well, my plan from the start was to remove the black lines around them, so here you can see the start of that. No more legs!

I was getting really close... all I had left really was the sky. I've done quite a few blue skies in my previous Droids Customs, so I was thinking maybe shake things up. Maybe a night sky! But then I realized if I had a black and gray TIE Pilot on top of a black and gray TIE Fighter against a black and gray sky... that would be very uncolorful.

So I thought... why not go the other direction? Let's go very colorful!

I'm super happy with how that turned out. Just gorgeous.

My final task was to add some blaster shots. I tried to find out what color TIE Pilot blaster bolts were from Google, but the blaster the Kenner toy uses isn't anything like the ones they use in any other media. I learned from the lore that red is the most common because it's cheaper, so I went with red.

So next up will be dropping this art onto my template and editing the card front and back until I'm happy. Looking at my schedule, I think I'm gonna assemble these over Thanksgiving break. The next couple weekends I have stuff planned, so I won't have time before then. So it's looking like these will go on sale in 3 weeks if all goes according to plan.