Arbuckle Rogers - Venutian Ventilators (Nerf Repaints)

Short post today, sorry.  I'll make it up next week when I do the first in a series of leather demos suitable for all genres of costuming... in the meantime, hie thee to the armoury!

I didn't have the budget for one of these from the wizards at the WETA workshop (Follow that link if you've never seen the Weta raygun collection. The advertising videos alone are worth the trip!)  I  also, sadly, didn't have the time to trawl thrft stores looking for just the right lamp bits to make one of these beauties.

So, like thousands of raygun-craving steampunks before me, I picked up some spray paint and went hunting for just the right Nerf gun...

In keeping with the theme, they are a repaint of a Nerf gun that's rarely seen and probably discontinued, a single-shot Nerf Tech Target pistol which has delightful Atomic Age lines and once I hit it with a bright metallic gold spray paint and just as I did with the helmet, I treated it with a wash of burnt umber FW acrylic drawing ink to deaden the glow-in-the-dark shine of the gold, they look as if they're old brass.
It occurs to me that a proper "antiquing your props" article needs to happen.

I also made a custom wet-formed leather "gunslinger" gunbelt for these and between this and the leather masks I make (which use a very similar process) I think I'm about ready to do the wet-formed leather tutorial I've been meaning to do for quite some time now.

(Coming soon!)

Eventually, the mood might strike me and I'll make myself a scratch-built set of dueling pistols, but for now, I'm content to focus my attentions elsewhere and in the meantime, it's nice to be able to pummel my friends and enemies with foam darts.