7th March 2009: Painting - and a finished gun! Not having anywhere to spray paint, I chose to use enamel to paint it. Now, I find enamel a bitch to work with, but it does give a really nice covering after 4-5 layers, and is far more durable than acrylic I've found. And wahey, finished gun!

Total materials used for the gun - foamboard sheets (about 2-3mm thick?), PVA glue, filler, pen lid (RIP), metal studs, enamel pant & gesso. Tools used were a generic Stanley knife, and sandpaper/glasspaper for gentle shaping.

This has just taken me a long time to resize everything, so I'll continue with the backpack later...unfortunately have less photos of that!

6th March 2009: Nearly there... Many layers later, it looked a bit more substantial! And then many more layers as I got a little perfectionist...

5th March 2009: Gesso! And detaily bits I alternated layers of the filler with layers of black gesso, which helped to highlight any bits that weren't very smooth. I also added in the little details such as the gun point (a cut off pen lid) and the bolts (small metal studs)

4th March 2009: Sanding Once all together, the longest process of all started - sanding bit by bit and filling in the gaps. I used a pre-mixed filler called Onetime by Red Devil, dries really quickly and sands really smooth. Also non-toxic! I swapped between using really really fine sand/glass paper and a metal file to get into the corners. I tried using my dremel but it was a bit too violent for it. It became therapeutic after a while...

3rd March 2009: Gluuuuuuuuue. (sub-heading - where I make a lot of mess) I cut the templates out of card, cut the right numbers out of the foamboard and stuck them together with PVA glue. I normally use hardcore stuff to stick things together as I'm paranoid, but PVA works perfectly well, is lightweight and sands down fairly easily. Just have to be patient while it dries...

2nd March 2009: Gun layers Once cut out I checked to see if it actually fit me when I held it, as drawing it was a bit of guestimation! I decided the easiest way to make the gun with the materials I had was out of layers of foamboard glued together - it would be easy to make in my room and light to carry. Sitting down, I worked out how many layers I'd need, and color coded them on the drawing to make it easier for me to work out which layers needed to be what shape.

1st March 2009: It starts... Okay, so as I actually took some crappy phone photos of the progress on this, I thought I should try and document how I made things! So here's a vague, sketchy plan of how to make a prop in your bedroom with no powertools & no spraypaint! Oh how I pray for a garage one day.... I may have missed out a few steps now and then as I got over-excited with progress and forgot to take photos.... Right - starting with the gun! I thought I had to use the model gun as reference at first (teeeny tiny red thing, nightmare) but then found some awesome blueprints for the gun someone had scanned in. So I copied that and drew it out on card as something to start with.