DIY Star Wars Garden Pots

We are huge fans of Star Wars! With May the Forth coinciding with the start of gardening season, I thought it would be fun to celebrate by making some DIY Star Wars Garden Pots! Here’s a quick tutorial for how to make your own Star Wars planters.

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These cute Star Wars garden pots are super easy to make – you just have to have a confident hand and about half an hour to spare. They would make the perfect homemade gift for a Star Wars fan, and you could even combine it with a small trowel, soil, and seeds or starter plants for a Star Wars garden kit!

Or, you could decorate it like we did with our garden wind chime or a Star Wars wind chime!

How to Make DIY Star Wars Garden Pots

First, gather your materials:

Garden pots
Pencil
Paint brushes – at least one detail brush
Paint – gold, white, black, silver or gray, blue, and red
Water sealant

For our set, I made one Darth Vader, one Storm Trooper, one C3PO, and one R2D2 – but feel free to make as many as you’d like and to experiment with different characters!

Start off by painting base coats on the pots:

one pot black
one pot white
one pot white, leaving the rim unpainted
one pot gold

Look at pictures of the characters and with a pencil, sketch out their features onto the garden pots. Go back and erase any unnecessary lines or details when you’re done. I’m showing you my sketches so you can see what I came up with.

The point isn’t perfection – and getting caught up in perfection can actually make for sloppier work. Just use the most prominent lines and features to imply the characters’ features.

Also, the more confident you are with sketching out the details, the better the outlines will be. Even if you over-confidently outline the buttons on R2D2 and end up with less than his actual character has, you still get a confident representation of his character, rather than a muddled mess!

Take your time painting each pot, going over the lines with a detail brush. If you don’t have a detail brush you can use a pen dipped in paint – just don’t make it your favourite pen!

For Darth Vader, I used a silver paint to bring out the “edges of his mask.”

For the Storm Trooper, I painted with black for the goggles, mask vents (including the mouth), and to imply the edge of the helmet and the curve of the mask at the chin.

For C3PO, I used a different hue of gold paint (although you could just add a bit of white to your base gold) and painted stripes in the eye circles, painted the rim of the pot, and painted around the main face to show the angles. I used a black paint to add dots on the eyes and paint his “mouth.”

By then, I was worked up for R2D2 – he is definitely best saved for last once you’ve built up your confidence a bit!

For R2D2, I used silver paint for the rim and to accentuate a few buttons. I then took the blue paint and did the detailing in the rim and the buttons on his body. I went back over the center button with the silver paint. I added on his laser with a bit of red, and added his projector and slots with black paint. I used a pen dipped in silver paint for the really thin lines.

Last, I sprayed all of the pots with a water resistant spray so that they will stay pristine in the garden!