Water Blades & A Fancy Gun

Welcome back to another catchup post for the props I’ve put together over the pandemic! This time around we’re looking at another Genshin Impact commission, though this time around the weapons in question were much smaller and simpler than the Wolf’s Gravestone. I’m referring to Tartaglia’s water blades!

These were a pretty standard build for me, with MDF at the core and foam layers to build out the details. Since this is a simple one, we’re also gonna take a look at a second prop that you can see the start of in here…

As per usual, now that we have some foam layers on there, it’s time for the dremel!

I also used some worbla scraps to help even things out in some places. There’s not really any other weird details or anything on these details, so most of the fun now comes with the painting!

These blades were made for HeckinSleepy, just like the Gravestone, so I got to complain to him about having to paint gradients again XD

After the several hours worth of painting between the two blades, and the clear coat at the end, we have two lovely, watery-looikin swords.

Since this was a quick build, let’s take a look at the second prop you got a sneak peek of in the first photo. This time, we’re looking at Herlock Sholme’s revolver from the Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (which I will definitely get around to playing at some point…)

Like the swords, the gun is also MDF at the core, but this time around there’s a lot more fun little details to worry about.

As for all of the parts, the barrel and the shells are wooden dowels, the cylinder is a slice of cardboard packing tube, and most of the smaller details like the flower shapes are made of pressed paperboard. There’s also a fair bit of worbla for the details, including the quarter-spheres that go behind cylinder, which are worbla over a chunk of foam stress ball… that’s right I’m back on my shit using random bits of trash in my props, but they really were the perfect size for this project and I already used the other half of the ball for something else ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here you can see all of the bits fit together and it’s already got a couple of coats of plasti-dip on it! Fun fact, the little round “pin” toward the top of the grip isn’t actually a separate piece. Since the grip has foam on it, I pressed the end of a paper straw into the foam and spun it around a bit to crease the shape into it. It works very well for rivets and the like when you’re working with foam.

With the structure finished, all that’s left is painting!

It’s been a while but if you remember my usual rule when it comes to painting: start with the colors that cover the worst, namely yellow, red, pink, white, and metallics. Also, undercoat your metallics with as similar a color as you can manage, in this case honey brown for the gold. The pastel-colored rounds would come next before i did the metallic top coat, but I don’t have another photo mid-paint so here’s the finished gun!

I didn’t mention earlier, but the pipe was also a part of the commission, but there wasn’t much to that guy. I started with a plastic pipe I bought off Amazon since I wanted to make sure my client could stick the end in their mouth without having to worry about damaging the piece or ending up with anything unpleasant in their mouth. Add some worbla rings and dome stickers, paint, and voila! Thankfully the pipe didn’t need to come apart and connect to the gun like the reference artwork shows.

That’s all for this week, come back soon where we’ll take a look at more of my backlog of pandemic props!