I visited my family this past weekend for Easter and I was able to work on a couple of Star Wars projects while I was home. My boyfriend got me an ARF clone trooper helmet kit for Christmas a few months back and I haven't had much time to work on it until now. My best friend also asked me to make a TIE Pilot comm pad for a costume that she's working on. Both were two very different projects but I enjoyed working on them.

I started with the TIE comm pad because I knew had to make it from scratch and I didn't know how long it would take me to complete. Before touching any materials, I did my research to see what the comm pad needed to look like. Knowing that I didn't have enough time to sculpt a comm pad and cast it in resin, I decided to use some spare ABS plastic that I had lying around.



The comm pad is mostly made up of squares and rectangles, which were very easy to cut out. The hardest part was making the smaller buttons with fine details. One button has 24 small divots in a grid pattern. I used a small spherical Dremel tip to drill those and then painted the divots black. After cutting all the pieces and sanding the edges, I painted them individually and then glued them all together in their specific pattern. The last 3 gray buttons needed tiny details cut into them. I attempted to cut these with the Dremel, but since they were so small, it didn't look clean enough for my liking. I decided to hand paint these designs black.