Turn a toy gun into a cosplay prop!

Hiya peeps!

On 8th October I went on a mission, as some might remember. Basically plowing through all four second-hand stores in town, in hopes of finding a toy gun to modify for Taregard Frir.
Luck was on my side and one of the shops had toy guns; luckily they were cheap, in fair condition and there was a bag with two and one with three. The bag with two guns had identical ones and the one with three had three different ones. I bought the bag with three because it had one with the style I wanted.

Gun bag! :D

The following day I took out the one I planned to use (for now) and went to spray paint it. I wanted to have some details in red so I first sprayed a part of the gun red.

Toy gun before modifications..

After getting a dose of metallic red spray paint.

It was fairly windy and around 0 °C so yeah, I was freezing my fingers off. When I deemed that it had dried enough I went back inside my apartment and put it very carefully on the newspapers I had been spraying on. What I didn't think about was that the paint wasn't 100% dry and so of course –after a few hours– when I moved it the newspaper had stuck to a small part of the gun and glued itself to it. FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUU-
I carefully peeled it off with my nail but of course some of the paint went with it. Blegh. :C So I had to go back out and fix that spot. And yeah, when I came back inside I was wiser than last time...

HANG THE FUCKER TO DRY!! >8D Boahaha!
(excuse my extremely dusty fan.. it collects dust so fast it's not even funny)

On 10th October I had planned to finish spray painting the gun, but... *gritting teeth* THE WEATHER DIDN'T WANT TO COOPERATE!! 8C Yeah, it was super cloudy and snowing/raining all day. All day. Not to mention that it was so moist outside that it wasn't even funny! D: I couldn't go outside spraying because there was no outside area close-by with a roof or anything to protect from the snow and rain – and I know from previous experience that spray painting when it snows is horrible because the snow will stick to your newly painted surface –while you wait for it to dry– and make this kind of "cracked snowflakes" on it and well, it looks fugly and might ruin your work. :C I couldn't spray outside and then run with the gun back inside either because my apartment is so horribly small and has shitty air circulation so yeah, I would probably have gotten poisoned from the paint fumes lingering around for the following month. xD Needless to say no painting was done that day and that also meant that I didn't get my gun prop done in time for Taregard's debut. Meh. Oh well, rather that than potentially risk ruining it as well as endangering my health...

Some days later I went ahead to put masking tape on the areas of the gun that I wanted to keep red – the rest was to be painted silver. It took a while to get the tape strips to be just the right width and shape that I needed; it's tedious to cut tape with such precision. xD
By this time it had started going below zero outside quite frequently too, which also meant that I had given up on getting the spray painting done. Yeah, I've had previous experience with spray painting outside in the cold and have the paint ending up looking fugly on the surface of the item because it kinda froze before drying properly. Not amused. >_>

Fast forward to somewhere very soon after Christmas 24th – I was at mom's place and had taken the toy gun with me. I had been thinking about finding something to fill the two holes in the gun where the screws were placed; if I didn't fill them in I would constantly have to be aware of what side of the gun I was showing to the camera because the side with the holes just looked shittier. I went to my stepdad and asked him if he happened to have any stuff that could work for this purpose and he told me that he had some brown silicone lying around that would do the trick. I left the gun in his care and a few days later when I went back home the holes were filled with brown wonder and it had dried too!

Gun with the masking tape and silicone-filled holes.

Close-up of the silicone.

The thing with silicone is that seemingly when it dries it sinks in a little and so the surface wasn't completely flat. I don't know if my explanation makes sense so I'll just draw you a crappy Paint picture instead to make sure everyone knows what I'm talking about. xD

So yeah, instead of having the desired B finish I had the A one. This meant that I still needed to put something on top of the silicone so that it would even out – I thought that white glue would do the trick.

Glue recently added.

So I basically just put some Erikeeper white glue on top of the silicone and played the waiting game. I had waited a few days between applying the glue to make sure that the silicone was 100% dry. After this was done I waited for the weather to be "warm", aka around 0 °C or above so that I could go out and try my luck at spray painting again.
On 7th January the weather seemed to be kinda okay (I couldn't check temperature anywhere so I had to guess) so I took my gun, the silver spray can, some rope –to hang the gun from– and went outside. As soon as I got outside and started spraying it seemed to be okay.. until about one half of the gun was painted and the spray can died. 8C Okay, it didn't die because there was still obviously paint left in it but the presser just stopped responding altogether; I kept pressing it down, twisting and turning it and I even took it off to check if anything was wrong but it looked fine! Dafuq man. :S
I ragequited after a while and went back inside; inside I thought that maybe if I took the black spray releaser thingy from my other spray can (a dark red one) and put it on the silver one then maybe it would work. I quickly tried it inside and it seemed to work like a charm and so I hurried back outside again! :'D As soon as I got outside I pressed the sprayer down and OH MY GOD IT WORKED!! 8DD ................. for one second. Fuck. 8C I noticed that the exact same thing happened again, except that this time the presser made this kind of slight air-is-coming-out sounds but no paint came with it. I looked closer in the "mouth hole" of the thing and noticed that the paint was slowly seeping out in its liquid form; I also took off the whole presser thingy and noticed that some more liquid paint had flowed up under it!

Presser taken off just to illustrate, but on this pic I had already
wiped off the liquid build-up. (Hasakitsuki holding it)

I went back inside, wiped off all the paint that had bubbled up from the can and decided to see if the presser would return to normal if I waited a few minutes and then painted indoors. After some minutes of furiously hammering pressing the black button down it suddenly came back from the dead and it even sprayed to boot! Ohmaiglab! What wasn't so wonderful was that the spray ended up on the apartment's bathroom wall, oops. Let's keep that a secret... *innocent whistling*
I went to fetch some old newspapers to protect the shower/bathroom floor and then I could FINALLY paint the rest of the gun. I just did one thick layer (should have done thinner layers but I was too impatient for that shit lol) and hung it from the string to dry in the shower curtain holder thingy. I then exited the apartment to go do some other stuff because I swear my apartment has the most horrible air circulation/ventilation/whatever and the paint fumes were so strong that I felt sick. I opened the air vent to maximum and left for some hours; when I came back the gun was still sticky but it was at least dry enough so that I could spray the areas that I had missed previously. I left it to dry again and went to squat at Jäätynyt Enkeli's place to wait out the paint fumes.

Painted gun hanging to dry in the shower...

A few days later I came back to check up on the gun – it had dried completely. I took off the masking tape and crossed my fingers that the silver spray paint hadn't bled in under the tape and on the area that was to remain red. Luckily it had stayed red almost completely and only some minor touch-ups were needed.

Just showing the spots that need some touch-ups...

So since the whole gun was already silver I couldn't be bothered to tape the whole shit so I just took a pencil, the red spray paint, Hasakitsuki's hands and a plastic bottle. So she sprayed very little and veeery close on the bottle and meanwhile I quickly dipped my pencil in the spray liquid –while it was still wet– and painted the spots red.

To finish it off I borrowed some black hobby paint from Jäätynyt Enkeli and painted some other areas black to make it 20% cooler.

Waiting for black paint to dry.. (it took approx. 40 min)

I painted both sides black and it was really tedious. The paint didn't act like the paints I'm used to – it felt thicker and well, much more rubbery. I had to paint very slowly (dip the brush in the paint after each time I painted a dot the size of the brush tip) and use much paint to get a nice result or all the brush strokes would show, even though the surface remained kinda bumpy. It was seemingly some akrylat-latex (that's in Swedish) paint.

I left the gun to dry over the night hung it from the kitchen lamp and on the morning it was all done! Looks much cooler than when it was just all black and it wasn't even hard except annoying with the spray can derps to give it a make-over! :D

LOOK AT MY GUN, MY GUN IS AMAZING ~~

You might have noticed that on the last photos there's still two holes at the red part of the gun – I didn't remember them, because I put the tape over long before I thought of filling them up, and so I forgot that they were even there during the whole remake process; a little miss on my side. I plan to cover them up later.

Taregard's gun is finally done, w00p w00p! o/
Shiro Samurai out.