Mikey Does Some Commissions, Part 3

Alright everyone, it's time for the final installment here, with my last prop commission! Last up here is Jak's Morph Gun!

Building from front to back, I started with some PVC for the barrels, and some or my favorite material. You guessed it: foamcore board. Add some poster board, craft foam & worbla and we're in business!

I built an understructure with the foamcore. As you can see, I cut holes to slide the PVC through, then wrapped the outside with a layer of poster board and then worbla.

With a few layers of worbla and some craft foam, I made the extra bits. More PVC & craft foam made the handle and the butt of the gun. Blah blah, embellish, and add some more worbla and...

The nice thing with this commission, is that my client wanted to paint it herself, so all I had to do was prime, and it's ready to go!

And there you have it! I hope to get some photos of the thing all painted along with her costume, so with any luck I'll be sharing that with you at some point in the future!

Also, I forgot about another prop that's kind of a commission that I made in secret so I'll be adding a special Part 4 to this series!

Mikey Does Some Commissions, Part 2

Welcome back! You know what's going on here, so let's get right into what I've been making! As I told you guys last time, I had another Fire Emblem prop to put together (also for Youmacon, just like the Adam Syringe), and it probably comes as no surprise to anyone that it's from Fates.

Yes, I had the privilege of making Xander's awesome sword of doom, Seigfried!

Ok, well I also have the privilege of making his armor, but that part wont be done for another few months yet. Yay winter when I have nothing else to do but craft for hours on end.

This was a very exciting prospect, because 1) I love making swords and I'm confident in my methodology and 2), this sword is a very interesting shape so while it makes my job more difficult, it also makes the finished product a lot more interesting!

So, how did I do it? Well, it's pretty much the same as most of the other bladed weapons I've made more recently. The first thing we need is a wood core, jigsawed into the shape we need. In the past, I've done blades exclusively out of foamcore, but for this one the wood base is pretty important just because of the shape of the sword, and how thin the blade is in certain parts. I've also been using a wood base a lot more frequently now because it meant the sharp tips of the blades have some structure and won't immediately crush in on themselves if you put the sword down on its tip (not that I recommend doing that anyway)

Of course, as always, I started by patterning out half of the sword (so I could make it smymmetrical), then transferring the pattern to the wood, and jigsawwing away!

Finish it up with some sanding (and by some I mean over an hour's worth with all of those edges), and you're ready to move on to the next step.

Now we take that same pattern, and trace it onto some foamcore board (two pieces, to be exact). Once the whole pattern is put onto the foamcore, use your X-acto knife to cut out the shapes.

You'll probably notice that it's not all one solid piece. I made separate pieces here because of the contours in the hilt. I didn't want to make the hilt overly bulky, so instead of cutting a full layer, then adding the other hilt pieces on top, I just used the wood base and cut the pieces separately to achieve the contouring I needed. Once the beveling was done (by cutting a line, pulling off the paper, and sanding the foam down to a sloped edge), everything went together.

Most of you know by know that for all of the raw foam edges, I smear on a good helping of spackling paste, then sand it smooth once it's dry. This helps get rid of the texture on the foam, adds some stability, and helps seal & protect the foam for our later steps.

The handle details were achieved using craft foam, cut into the raised design, which was then covered with worbla. If you're doing something like this over foamcore, BE CAREFUL! The foam in foamcore board will melt if you apply too much heat, even when it's sealed with mod podge, or has spackling paste on it (you don't have to worry about the craft foam, you can heat it up plenty without it melting, it'll just get droopy when it's hot).

Also, that jewel/dome thing on the hilt was cast in plastic, but you can find oval domes of all sizes by searching for "Oval Dome Cabochon" on Amazon.

The rest is pretty simple, coat in a few layers of Mod Podge (I probably did 3 for this one), prime it (I used black spray paint + primer), then paint away! Another coat of Mod Podge to seal in the paint and give it a nice sheen and you're done!

And that's all there is to it! We have one more installment here since I was working on 3 projects at the same time, so look out for "Part 3" shortly here!

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!