#weapon tutorial

STEP 1: SKETCH THAT MOFO. I tend to free hand all my designs, but if you look hard enough on the interwebz you can probably find a real pattern. 

STEP 2: MAKE SURE THE THING IS THE RIGHT SIZE. This is important!!! You cannot just take measurements from another person, the weapon must be proportional to you! If you are very tall or very short, your weapon is going to look weird if you make it using cannonical dimensions...if you can find them at all. 

STEP 3: STRUCTURAL SUPPORT. I used cardboard and a wooden dowel. Take note of the size of the cardboard; it's about a inch-ish smaller than the pattern on all sides. This is so I have room to build up.

STEP 4: PAPER AND TAPE. This part you can use anything, really. I decided to use balled up paper and masking tape. This is just to make the basic shape. You will want this part to be as light as possible, as the steps later on will add heavier components. 

STEP 5: PAPER MACHE. This step is just to harden the shape you created with the paper and tape. Don't worry about bumps and shit, it's going to be messy and that's ok. 

STEP 6. WOOD FILLER, SANDING, MOD PODGE. Cover that fucker with wood filler. Just all over. Everywhere. Build up the shapes if they didn't form from the paper mache. Then sand it down to be nice and smooth. (repeat as necessary) When you are happy with the shape, cover it with a couple layers of mod podge to protect it.

STEP 7: WORBLAAA. Using the pattern you made earlier, cut out the shapes in foam and cover them in worbla. If you have gaps between the base and the worbla just fill it with more wood filler, or hot glue, or paper....whatever. Then seal it with whatever you want, I used mod podge again. (I wanted a wood-like texture so I took advantage of the brushstrokes you get with mod podge and made sure to only brush horizontally)(if you don't want this texture I would use something better than mod podge) 

STEP 8: PAINT THAT BITCH. I used a spray paint primer to start and then hand painted the rest. All acrylic paint. Then more mod podge as a top coat.

STEP 9: ROCK THAT BOW. It's heavy as shit and very awkward but it looks good in pictures, and that's all that really matters :P

This is the primary guide we used for the sword. The size of the sword depends on what you want to do. If you’re cosplaying Rose Quartz, the sword is sized to her so you’ll make it smaller than if you were cosplaying Connie or Steven. If you’re cosplaying Stevonnie, the sword is smaller than Connie or Steven, but still larger than Rose Quartz.

Or you can ignore all of that make the sword however big or small you want because it’s your sword.

The total length of our sword is 39 1/2 inches. The blade itself is 29 1/2 inches and 3 inches across. The grip is longer to accommodate two hands, but you could make it one-handed if you wanted.

For easy transportation, consider making the blade removable. The easiest way is to drill into the grip and blade a few inches, then glue a metal rod into the blade. Drop the rod into the grip and you’re done. This method will also give the blade more support, especially if you’re using EVA foam.

The Blade

(Previous post on the blade)

If you use Sintra and there’s a TAP Plastics nearby (or other place that will cut to order), a 3 feet by 3 inch piece 1/2 inch piece is only 5 dollars.

For the bevel, we used a belt sander and WM Armory’s beveling tutorial.

http://www.wmarmory.com/?p=2248

If you don’t have a belt sander but have a rotary tool:

http://www.wmarmory.com/?p=1210

The above tutorials will also work on EVA foam if that’s what you choose to make the blade out of. Make sure you practice before tackling the blade itself. It’s really easy to mess up and gouge the material. We had to get a second blade piece cut because of this.  

It’s also up to how far the bevel goes. You can either bevel the entire light pink section or stop short. Our bevel only goes halfway up the light pink because we had trouble getting a full bevel to look good on both sides.

The decorative collar on the blade is 2mm EVA foam. I used cardstock to make a pattern, cut it out of foam, painted it, and glued it on. The lighter rose petal portion was a separate piece, but you can make it all one piece.

The Hilt

We ended up making two hilts. The first was completely out of EVA foam.

I ended up taking two pieces of 3 mm EVA foam, heating them up with a heat gun, then squishing them into a bowl to force the dome shape. The two pieces were glued together, the edges sanded flush, and filled with wood filler. The curved part was cut from 6 mm EVA foam and heat formed to get the curve in before I glued it to the hilt.

For structural reasons, we ended up moving to a styrene hilt. However, using EVA foam will absolutely work!

The second hilt used the exact same method as the first one, except Queadlunn used the stove to heat up the styrene. BE VERY CAREFUL WHEN HEATING PLASTIC.

The circles on the underside of the hilt are 2 mm EVA foam circles cut with the circle cutter on our drill press. You could cut the circles by hand or paint them on.

With the decorative flower piece on the hilt, we decided to go a different route and create a physical piece instead of painting it on. Queadlunn covered the hilt and the bottom of the blade with plastic wrap, put WaterWeld Expoy Putty on top of the hilt, and squished the blade down on it. That created a small lip and clear indentation of where the blade sat. Once the WaterWeid dried, Queadlunn used a rotary tool to carve the shape. The piece was later sealed to the hilt with JB Weld epoxy.

If you want to do something similar, you could probably do the same with clay.

The Grip and Pommel

You can see it assembled in the hilt picture above, but these are the separate pieces.

The grip is a an oak dowel cut to size and wrapped with leather. We got lucky and found some leather from a leather supply shop that was a close match to the color we needed. Queadlunn cut a strip of leather, glued it down as he wrapped it, then went back with leather cord painted dark purple and wrapped it around the seams.

The pommel consists of two Sintra pieces. The circle was cut using a circle cutter, then the edges cut in with a rotary tool. Instead of using white like the picture shows, we used light pink to tie the color in.

The larger pommel piece was several discs of Sintra glued together with contact cement and sanded to a taper with the belt sander. The gem housing and petals were cut with a rotary tool. The pink on the pommel is the same pink used on the hilt.

The gem itself was a plastic gem picked up from the craft foam, painted pink with Sharpie markers, and glued in with clear epoxy.

Painting the Sword

Here are the main colors we used

Dark pink (blade): Valspar Satin Thistle Field (85020)

Light pink (blade): Krylon Colormaster Ballet Slipper Satin

Hilt, pommel: Valspar Gloss Frosty Berry (85022)

Dark purple: Valspar Satin Sumptous Purple (85025)

The blade was wetsanded to make it smooth and shiny. If you don’t know what wetsanding is, I wrote a tutorial on it:

https://ohicosplay.tumblr.com/post/118296273887/the-ura-once-nearly-sacked-the-city-with-these

It’s entirely optional, but if you want some extra gloss, there you go.

The vine pattern was painted by Queadlunn. He masked the whole sword with tape* and drew out the pattern with a compass and freehand, then used a X-acto knife to cut the pattern out. He painted everything with white acrylic paint, then once it was dried, remasked it, and used pink acrylic paint to paint the center stripe.

The same was done for the vine pattern on the grip.

The inside of the hilt was painted with purple spray paint, then the two circles were glued in after.

The final seal coat is an acrylic sealer/finish in semi-gloss and we don’t be doing any weathering to keep the pristine/cartoony look. The finish you go with and if you do any weathering is entirely up to you.

To start with, I picked up a toy pirate pistol on the cheap because the light-up feature was broken. It wasn’t exactly the right shape but it was still a flintlock and close enough to work with. The hammer popped off easily. I created a barrier of masking tape straight up the middle of the gun’s width and surrounded the section I wanted to cast with the cardboard from a cereal box, which I extended the tape barrier to. (I’ve seen several tutorials that call for a clay barrier instead of tape, and I’m sure it would have worked better. I didn’t have that much clay, though, so I cheaped out.) I then covered the whole thing with 5-6 coats of Castin’ Craft Mold Builder that I bought from the craft store Michael’s.

Once the Mold Builder dried, I filled the top half of the cardboard shell with plaster from Lowes and let it harden. Once the first half was done, I flipped it over and did the same thing to the other side. It’s important to spray the existing Mold Builder with Mold Release first, though, or the layers will just stick together and your mold won’t come apart at all.

And a lovely mold of the pirate pistol.

I put the mold back together, duct taped it up, and poured more plaster mix down into it to create a plaster cast of the pirate pistol. I had to set it in a foil tray in case the plaster started leaking out (the tape didn’t form the best seal, but eventually I got it to work) and I had to tape it to some supports to keep it from falling over while the plaster dried.

Heck yeah, perfect cast of the pirate pistol! Well, almost perfect. The trigger guard was very skinny and broke off right away, but that was fixable. You’ll notice that the cast picked up everything, including the fake wood grain, the holes for the toy’s screws, the holes of the speaker (the pistol was supposed to make noise), and the outline of the battery pack. I didn’t want these to show on the Jaeris gun so here’s where the real modding starts.

The first order of business was a chisel. I very, VERY carefully chiseled the front of the gun base into the same shape as Jaeris’ and removed the bit of the barrel up top. The trigger and the rest of the guard broke off around this time too, because they were fragile. Next came sandpaper, where I sanded down the shape I had just made and then went over the rest of the hilt to take away the fake wood grain and holes from the speaker and battery pack. Aww, it’s so smooth and pretty!

For the shape of the barrel, I bought a thick dowel rod and cut it to the right length. (In the pic you see me hacking at it with wire cutters, which was all I had at the time. It was hard as crap and a very messy cut. Don’t make my mistake, friends. Just spend the $10 on a hand saw, it’s worth it.) Also because I had no better way to do it, I ended up forming the rounded dowel into a hexagon and removing the bottom part of the bit that would sit on top of the gun base (in a real flintlock it would be inside the actual wood or brass or whatever, but I was NOT going to crack that plaster by trying to hollow it out) by shaving it away with an x-acto knife. Again, very slow and inefficient. Buy a hand saw.

Once the subtractive forms of modification were done, it was time for the additive ones. I used Super Sculpey to make the decorative brass at the bottom of the hilt and front of the gun base, as well as to recreate the trigger and guard. I hot glued the dowel rod to the plaster and sanded it all to fit, then used the Super Sculpey to build up the barrel’s end and the brass rim near the midpoint. Sculpey is good for smoothing out all the awkward edges too.

Now the original intention was just to use the plaster/wood/Sculpey combo to get the shape right. From there, the plan was to cast a final resin copy that I would paint, my thinking being that resin was more durable and wouldn’t snap if I dropped it. This is where things started to go downhill. I made a plaster mold of the new fancy gun shape the same way I did for the pirate pistol…

But resin casting is a problem. I used Castin’ Craft again, because that’s what was available at the local Michael’s. You have two liquids and have to get the ratio right when you mix them, which I’m pretty sure I did. But then there are the fumes. Really awful fumes. You need good ventilation when you do this and at the time I lived in an apartment without a balcony so…yeah, I was really worried about my roommate’s cat breathing that shit. Sorry, kitty. Another problem I ran into was that this second mold didn’t fit together as well as the first one. Or perhaps the resin was just thinner than the plaster, because no matter how much duct tape I piled on, the damn thing leaked. And that’s why we put it in a foil tray.

But the worst part was that the resin never cured all the way even though I let it sit for more than twice the recommended time. This was the result: a sticky, lumpy mess with jacked up edges (because the mold didn’t fit together properly), that was only half there because did I mention the mold leaked like hell?? I know the mixing ratio was fine, so I’m blaming the Florida humidity for the fact that it didn’t cure properly. I had to leave the thing outside the front door to cure (because fumes) in the middle of the summer and the humidity is killer. So…yeah, completely unusable.

Maybe I could do one in just plaster then? Nope. By this point the mold was fucked up so badly by the resin that a plaster casting of the entire gun turned out little better than the resin one. The halves didn’t line up, the edges were sloppy, the barrel cracked right off, and the whole thing was lumpy what is this I don’t even. Could I at least make a plaster cast of the hammer?

Nope.

By this point it was getting close to the con. I didn’t have time to keep messing around with this, and I’d already poured almost $200 and two to three weeks of time into it. The plaster/wood/Sculpey combo was still holding up well so I decided screw it, I was just going to paint and use that.

I did all my painting with acrylic. For the brass parts I gave it a few layers of a light brown, then went over it with a metallic gold to make it look more like brass. Some dark brown/black around the edges and crevices gives it a slightly weathered look and just makes it look more real, as opposed to “I just painted this with a solid coat of one color”. The ivory-colored hilt got painted with a very light cream/peach color. Same deal around the edges – a slightly darker outline around the brass sections gives the illusion of shadows and a semi-reflective quality that ivory and brass have but you can’t actually get with acrylics. I ended up just painting over the existing orange toy hammer and gluing it into the  appropriate hole rather than trying to make one.

Whoops, hot glue does not actually hold the barrel on well because the Florida humidity fucks with it. Man, when I lived up north I could hot glue anything and it would stay forever. Not so down here. I reattached the barrel with super glue this time and patched up the paint job.

From plastic toy pirate pistol to India brass Jaeris flintlock. I ended up spending over four times what it would have cost me to rent or buy a slightly-different replica, took up the kitchen table for almost three weeks, nearly killed the cat, fucked up in more ways that I’d thought possible for this project, and made a ridiculous mess. But I ended up with a piece I was very proud of, and which got a bunch of compliments from people at the con, including Lewis himself. (I told him I made it because I couldn’t find one. I believe he said he’d got his off the internet.)

I’ve worn the cosplay several times since and even though I’ve had to do minor repairs on it multiple times (the holster it sits in pushes kinda hard on the hammer and keeps knocking it off) it’s held up much better than I expected and I love it. And I’m content knowing that I ended up with the best possible prop considering that specific style of gun apparently isn’t available anymore-