Hey guys, it's been a minute. I unfortunately have not had the time to work on any projects for a long while. Thankfully though, I was able to give myself a small project to help get through the busy holiday season. My Girlfriend's family loves Star Wars and her mother collects Nutcrackers, so I made them this custom Darth Vader Nutcracker as a Christmas gift.
It was important to me that the colors wouldn't just be all black and silver. I wanted something that would pop and also keep a good Nutcracker aesthetic. I biased the color scheme off of some early 1970s Marvel Star Wars comic looks for Vader. They couldn't just use black ink back then so he was more of a Dark Blue with light blue highlights.
I got a blank nutcracker base to use since I have never worked with one before. I had a circular piece of wood that I used as the Helmet before adding some air dry clay to. I had to saw off the original head of the nutcracker to make sure the Helmet would fit on the shoulders.
I was able to follow my usual steps of sanding, cleaning, priming, and painting from there. Everything really just fell into place with this project. I wouldn't be opposed to making another nutcracker in the future.
The project took about 9 hours in total to complete but they were spread out over the course of two weeks. I had a lot of fun working on a project like this again. I want to get back into more projects soon.

















