Recently, we had a painting day, where lots of cardboard got painted, but how do we choose the colors?  I would love to say I had a fancy method for choosing the colors, but for me, it just comes down to figuring it out with some small acrylic paints, some paper plates and a piece of cardboard (to make sure the color will work when we paint it on cardboard later).

Here is a photo of my process for this year’s Halloween house.

I looked at pictures from the Mos Eisley scenes from Star Wars: A New Hope and did my best to approximate them with the paints I had.  I knew I needed a yellowish-sandy color for most of the buildings.  But, I also wanted those buildings to have a sand-like texture.  I had seen people do that by sponging on a slightly different color, so I went for that approach and came up with a Silly Putty color that seemed to do the trick.  Next was the rust-orange for the doors and an off-white for moisture vaporators.  For the Star Tours vehicle I decided that the white that I was going to use for the moisture vaporators would work nicely for the main color, so all that remained was to find a blue for the tricked-out trim (I decided to go old-Star Tours and go with the blue and white motif).

Once I was happy with the colors, I cut them out, took them to Lowes (cheapest and fastest paint mixer in town) and was ready to paint the town red.  Well, yellow, Silly Putty, rust-orange, off-white and blue.