May the Force Be With You, Again; Part Three : Airbrush Stencil Lettering and the Completed Cake

     For the Star Wars cake I knew I wanted the inscription to look like the movie logo, but wasn't sure how to pull it off, and really, really didn't want to cut each letter out of gumpaste or MC by hand. I went on-line and sure enough, found a Star Wars font generator here. I typed in my message, saved the picture, then loaded into a photo program , turned it into the size I needed and printed it out. I printed out to copies, which I will explain later (the extra copy can be any size, no need to waste expensive ink.

     I used a glue-stick to attach it to a piece of cardboard and cut it out with an x-acto knife. A pain in the ass to be sure, but still less of one than cutting out the letters themselves.

 Make sure to extend your cuts past the corners so the cardboard pieces come out neatly:

 I rolled out a piece of gumpaste and set my stencil on top:

 First sirbrushed it with yellow, trying to keep the airbrush as perpendicular to the piece as possible without spilling to avoid spraying color under the stencil edges:

 I went over it two more times with orange and red for shading:

 Lift stencil off carefully:

 Here you can see my extra copy I mentioned earlier. I kept it so I would know where to paint inside the letters since I couldn't cut out the negative pieces. Believe me, if you try to rely just on your memory you are bound to mess up, at least I would. After the colored airbrush dried I went over it with a paintbrush and black color. This took forever to dry, so I let it dry curved over a cake dummy with the same circumference as my cake was going to be so it would crack if I tried to put a flat logo on a rounded cake.

A lot of work for the words, but I loved the end result. Of course, if I had an edible ink printer I would have printed that sucker out in a heartbeat- I am not (that) crazy!

 And the finished cake. All the figures are rice cereal treat cores (except Chewie and C3PO who both have MC cores) , covered in MC, and painted with dusts and or airbrushed. The Death Star was just a piece of black foam board airbrushed with white and black food color,