Brett Bartniks shares his latest custom collectible. Thanks for sharing this with us!
This is a Bladebuilders Kylo Ren plastic extendible lightsaber. It’s one of those cheap plastic lightsabers, but it’s has potential to look good after painting it. I bought two of them and I am doing each one different. The first one is more of just painting it. So what I did was took out the plastic red lightsaber pieces. After that I primed the hilt with a grey rust-oleum spray paint. Let that dry for a few hours and then used a metallic aluminum spray paint. This takes a while to fully dry and cure so I left it for about 24 hours. Then it’s time to hand paint and give it that old look. So I used my old favorite product, Kiwi shoe polish. It’s needs about three or four coats of this. Then once you get that blackish weathered look that you desire, you take a dish sponge and use the rough part to take off some of that shoe polish. With this you will need a cup of warm water to dip the sponge in. This will help take of some shoe polish off in the areas that are supposed to look as if metal is being exposed. Now it’s time to paint the the wires red and blue, then paint the clip gold. Last but not least you can paint the side parts of the hilt to look like its was hot from the unstable blades. All you need to do is dry brush gold, red and blue. Try to blend them together the best you can. That is it for the basic one. The next one I am doing is not finished yet. It is the same steps except I decided to sand of the wires they had on it and take some real red and blue wire from the hardware store to put on for a more realistic look. The sanding takes a lot of elbow grease and time. So be patient. There are a couple pieces you’ll need to attach to the red wire. I used silver flashing. You can use sheet metal if you want. It’s just a few pieces to wrap around the red wire. I also sanded the hasbro logos off this one so it doesn’t have any of the logos on it. I will also attempt to put some red led lights in the hilt hooked up to a battery pack. Last but not least I made a base for it. I used a cheap piece of wood from Michaels and painted it black. I bought some red fabric from Walmart to make a back drop with a hand painted First Order logo on it. I used balsa wood to hold the cloth up. I made a T and stapled the cloth to the balsa wood. That’s my latest custom collectible. If you have any questions and want to attempt this, feel free to email me at Btbartnik@gmail.com. I hope everyone enjoys. I also have a Jakks Pacific Kylo Ren 20″ figure and a Jakks Pacific Scarif Shoretrooper 18″ figure I am customizing. They are almost done so expect those soon!
