Factors working against me: As usual, I left things until late, which means I did the entirety of this week's Thing Saturday night.
Factors working for me: The next day was the Sacramento Steampunk Society's trip to the zoo. As part of the event we had planned to have water gun duels in the park, so it was obvious what I needed to make.
Results: Here are the guns I started out with:
They were a pair of matching pistols once, although the orange one lost its trigger guard at some point. The first thing I had to do was use a dab of caulk to seal a hole where it had broken off that opened directly into the water chamber (which is basically the whole gun). Then I spray-painted them with a base coat. The green one became flat black and the orange one shiny chrome.
Here is the black gun completed:
I shined it up with a little silver Rub'n'Buff, copper acrylic paint, 3D stickers from the scrapbooking section at Michael's, and a couple small bits of a clock I took apart a while back. I also used some paint thinner on a Q-tip to restore a small section of the gun to translucent green, which gives it a little of a futuristic feel in contrast to the antiqued look of the rest of it. A word of warning: I have found that acrylic paints are not the best for squirt guns, as they tend to soften up with water and may rub off. In this case, I temporarily lost one of the stickers placed on top of the copper paint. I will look for something to seal it with before I take this gun to any more events.
Here's how the other one came out:
Somewhat less satisfactory, to the point I'm not sure I should count it as a bonus Thing (although I did take it to the zoo like this). I could tell pretty early on that I was going to want to re-do most of this gun at a later time. I wanted it to complement the other gun, with a slight Western feel, but with a color scheme that revolved around pearls. However, the placement of the pearls is less than ideal (I really only put them there to cover up the "Made in China", which can be sanded off). I also attempted to paint on faux mother-of-pearl inlay, but the color is off. Not to mention the clock parts at the back/top of the gun are held on with Scotch tape, since superglue wasn't working. Another thing I wanted to do with it, but didn't have time for, was to put sandy-colored paint in the cracks which would hopefully be evocative of desert mud, make it less shiny, and pull in the orange cameos (which are actually more scrapbooking stickers) to the overall color scheme of the gun.
