It is finally time to paint my cyberpunk pistol. I started by spray painting the whole thing black. I am using a matte black primer, but any sort of direct-to-metal paint will work. A couple thin coats, making sure to fill in all the nooks and crannies, and this is the result:
That's... actually pretty good. To be honest, up until now, I wasn't sure if this thing would turn out alright. Between the only half thought out plan, the complete inexperience on my part, and the shoddy craftsmanship, I was worried that I would have to scrap this project and find some other way to make a costume gun. But now that it's painted the right color, I'm really liking the results.
The next step is to weather the gun. I do this by layering a very light dry brushing of gun-metal gray paint over the whole gun. I keep the streaks running lengthwise down the gun, and add a little bit of emphasis to the edges of the various parts on the pistol's surface. The idea is to make the gun look worn from years of use and abuse. I tried the make the effect just noticeable. I'm not sure it will even show up in the convention photos, but even just a little bit of aging makes the gun more believable. I did paint the barrel, ejection port, and trigger gun-metal gray. It's a very heavy dry brushing. I thought the two-tone look would be more visually appealing than all black.
Next I painted some detailing onto the gun. First, some light gray dots on the sights to make 3-dot sights. Then some dots for the fire mode selector: a gray dot for safe, a red dot for semi-automatic, and three red dots for three round burst. Because I believe in excessive firepower. And lastly, I painted a logo onto the slide. I chose Ares, one of the megacorporations from the Shadowrun universe, because in-game, they are known for weapons manufacturing. The logo is copied from the Shadowrun source book. I finished by coating the whole thing in a matte varnish, to keep the paint from rubbing off or smearing from handling the gun.
The last thing I did to the gun was to wrap the grip. I had originally intended to wrap it in black electrical tape, but I couldn't find any that was thick enough to give a textured grip. So I used some suede leather cord instead. I think I like this better than the black tape. The slight contrast the dark brown gives is more interesting that black on black, and the way the cord looks gives the pistol an aftermarket, custom look that makes sense for a cyberpunk weapon.
There are two things left to do before the cyberpunk pistol is completely finished. First, I need a way to carry it around the convention all day without tying my hands up. I'm thinking either some magnets so I can just clip it straight to my hip, or some kind of lanyard, shoulder rig type thing. That will be the last thing I do before Dragon*Con. The other thing I want to do is make some accessories I can attach to the front of the gun. Lasers, scanners, things with lights, that sort of thing, but I'm short on time at this point, so that will have to wait for other conventions. But at this point, it's convention worthy.
Updated: A quick note on paints. I am using Citadel Paints from Games Workshop. I paint Warhammer miniatures, so I had the paints on hand. I've liked them and they haven't given me any trouble, but any modeling paints would work for this kind of project.
