This post is the first time I’ve ever done a writeup of my creative process so please be gentle. Any input will be appreciated 🙂

Step 1:

I 3D printed the gun on my CR10s in one piece so as to make the whole gun stronger. I have found that most of the time glue will not be as strong as the bond between the layers of a print.

This gun took 18 hours on the printer, and weighs about 250 grams before removing all of the support structures. (Little removable towers that increase the quality on overhangs)

Step 2:

Once the print was all cleaned off, I gave it a few coats of flat black spray paint to give me a good base to work off of.

I use flat black because the acrylic paint sticks very well and I like to build dark to light whenever I paint.

Step 3:

Whenever the base-coat dried, I gave it the first and second coat of gloss white enamel paint. I use brushes most of the time, but this could have been done easier with blue tape and a spray can.

Step 4:

As you can see, the first coat is rarely a “clean” process. Therefore, I have to go back over some parts with a few coats of black to clean everything up. It’s a whole lot easier to cover white with black than black with white.

Step 5:

At this point I can usually get a feel for the gun and know where there needs to be some detail lines. For this gun, I used a gloss black enamel to add dark lines and a little bit of shading.

Step 6:

Next up, I wanted to make some of the darker pieces look more like metal. The best way to do this is a combination of drybrushing and a wax compound called rub-n-buff.

Drybrushing /\

Rub-N-Buff /\

Step 7:

After everything was drybrushed I had to do some overall cleaning up. This included touchups with white, orange highlights, and painting the handle gloss black.

Step 8:

Finally, to protect the paint and blend everything together, I coated the gun in a matte clearcoat.

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