Mikey Does Some Commissions, Part 1

Welcome back, after my nearly month-long hiatus involving several weekends away from home for weddings, alumni weekends, and other events, I'm finally back in business here and getting some stuff done!

So let's not beat around the bush, I know your here for the deets, and I'm here to give them! First up is a commission I've had on the back burner for several months since she requested at the beginning of the year but didn't actually need it until the first weekend in November (god bless her for giving e so much lead time). As such, I've gotten to work on it slowly over all this time and I'm quite pleased to say that it's finally done! And what, might you ask, is this lovely item? None other than the terrifying Little Sister's Adam Syringe from Bioshock.

Thank god none of my sisters are this creepy...

So it all started with conceptualizing how I would put this thing together, but fortunately now that I've been doing this a while, I'm smart enough not to start by reinventing the wheel. I knew there were plenty of people who'd done this cosplay before, so I knew I'd have actual props to look at and see how other people made them. I don't usually copy the methodology exactly, but it does usually serve as a good jumping-off point, so for those of you out there making your own stuff, I'd encourage you to find other cosplayers who've done it and see if it helps you put together a plan (don't worry, I won't be mad if you get help from people other than me ;-)

This was particularly useful for this prop, because it gave me the wonderful idea to use an antique gas pump handle/nozzle. The specific place I found actually had the whole process, which you can look at HERE. 

Now where does one find an old gas nozzle like this? Well, the instructibles page actually had that answer too: Ebay! And it was surprisingly effective. I managed to find a very cheap listing that actually included two of these bad boys.

Now of course, as per usual, I took woefully few progress photos of this syringe in process, but my process ended up following that of the instructibles page fairly closely, so if you're looking at making one of these yourself, I'm sure that will do a better job explaining how to do it that I can when I don't have photos to show you what the heck I'm talking about. But, I can still walk you through the rest of the bits.

I went with less creepy, and more just scary

The ling needle ended up being a long bamboo skewer, that I filed the end down so it wouldn't actually stab anyone. The bottle on top is a baby bottle that I had to sand Mickey Mouse's face off of, but eventually I got it relatively clean & translucent. The Cap on the end, as you can probably guess, is just the nipple from the baby bottle, painted in metallic paint, and the connector pieces between the bottle and the nozzle are actually plastic bits that came with the baby bottle. They were supposed to snap over the top & cover the nipple. It was very convenient that the bottles I bought came with them, yay serendipity :-)

It also worked out well, because my friend wanted the bottle to light up, so I could hide the lights in another nipple inside the connector piece. I shoved one of these little Party Lights in there and it actually lit it quite well! And since the bottle screws into the cap, it makes it easy to just take the bottle on & off to turn on the light. The last bit was how to get the bottle to have the red liquid in it, which took a couple of tries before I got what I got. First, I tried to use this red stained-glass paint that I often use for my gems to give them color, but since it was on the inside of the bottle, it never really dried into a translucent film like it was supposed to. So instead I took some leftover floral resin (from the first time I tried resin casting, only to discover that floral resin never really gets hard, it kinda turns rubbery when it's done curing), mixed in red food coloring, and let it set. I knew the floral resin would be fine since it was inside a bottle so I didn't really need it to get super hard like I would for an external piece. I also knew from the last time that I used it that dying it with food coloring worked really well.

So now, we put everything together and weather it with some black paint... voila! We have an Adam Syringe!

And that's all for round 1! Come back next time for round 2, and I'll let you in on a little secret, it's another Fire Emblem prop!