Zombicide Machine Guns, part 2

Woohoo, here's part 2 of my Zombicide machine guns build! In the first part, I built the guns out of foam and plastic. Now it's time to paint them!

Materials and tools

• Foam primer (book binding glue/acrylic gesso 50/50)
• Wood primer
• Spray primer
• Acrylic paint
• Paintbrush and -roller
• Masking tape
• Paper towels
• Varnish

Video
Like the previous part, I made a video of this. Again, way too much footage. This one is a lot shorter than the first one. I'm getting better with the video editing software, it didn't take as long as the first time. But for future videos, I should really invest in proper lighting and a good microphone.

 

Priming
The start of any paint job is a good primer. For foam props, I use my glue/gesso mixture. This does a great job sealing the foam and providing a smooth surface. In this case, however, I used several other materials, so the foam primer alone wouldn't do.
But first, the foam parts. I thinned my primer a bit so I would get a smoother surface, and used a foam brush to avoid brush strokes. On my axe, I used a paint roller, but that only works for large even surfaces. I gave each gun three layers of primer, and then let them dry overnight. For the MDF parts, I used a wood primer.

The next day, I primed the guns with spray primer, so all the plastic parts would get a base coat. Three layers of primer, with about 30 minutes between each layer, and then curing overnight.

I plan to experiment a bit with other types of foam primers in the future. One type I'd like to try is Flexi Paint, wich is both a primer and paint developed specifically for EVA foam.

Chipped paint
To make the guns look old and used, I first of all wanted some chipped paint. This is surprisingly easy to create! I painted some silver spots where I wanted chipped paint, and after it had dried, I masked it with liquid latex. After the base color is painted over these spots, the latex is peeled off, revealing the silver below. This looks very realistic, because, well, it IS chipped paint!
I had to wait for the base color to fully dry before I saw the result of this trick, but I can already say I went a bit overboard. After peeling off the latex, I painted over some silver areas again, because I overdid it and it looked a bit fake. As for more effects, less is more!

Base colors
Before I started painting, I mixed a good base color. I couldn't find the right color in a spray can, so I had to mix it myself and use a brush. Funny thing, I do have an airbrush lying around (borrowed it from my brother, who doesn't use it anymore), but I need to get the right type of paint first, an adapter for the air hose and, most important of all, learn to use it and practice a lot first. So, for now, the good old paintbrush!
The base color is gray, darkened with some black and then a bit of blue. Guns usually have a blueish-gray color. I tested it first on a piece of foam, and waited for it to dry before checking the color. On acrylic paints, the color always changes a bit as the paint dries, and I didn't want any unpleasant surprises.
I wanted to avoid brush strokes as much as possible, but a paint roller wouldn't get into every small detail, so I used a brush first, and then went over it with a foam roller. This did a great job of removing the brush strokes.

After it had dried, I took my base color and darkened it a bit with more black. This was used for the grip, the bottom of the magazines and the forward grip on the big gun.

Details and weathering
Allright, so the paint had dried, and I had peeled off the latex that masked the silver spots. The next thing I did was drybrushing a bit of black on the handles and the exhausts on the muzzle brake. On the small guns, I painted a recessed area on the front of the guns white first, followed by orange. I painted it white first because the orange didn't really cover up the gray very well (yes, I tried). After the orange had dried, I used masking tape for fragile paint to make some black stripes. Orange and black hazard stripes are frequently used in Zombicide manuals and artwork, so it's a nice reference to the game.

But next came the most fun and messiest part: weathering! This turns a shiny, clean new prop in something old, worn and dirty. The first step was drybrushing white paint over all edges. This lightens them and makes them look a bit worn. This wasn't the messy part, but the next part was: washing!
I used a wash in most of my props, so I have explained it a lot already, but for anyone who's new to my blog, here it is again. Basically, you paint your entire prop black (or any other color you want to use) and then, while the paint is still wet, you wipe most of it off again with a paper towel. Paint remains in some areas, especially cracks and recesses, so it looks like dirt.

The black was ruined my white drybrushing job for the most part, so I had to repeat it. I should have known this would happen, but luckily the drybrushing didn't take long.
After all the weathering was done, I added a few final details. On the big gun, I added a kill count with red paint and a pen. And finally, I put some pale green dots on the sights on all three guns.
The only thing left was a protective clearcoat. On the magazines, I masked the exposed bullets with some masking tape and then gave everthing a few coats with matte spray varnish.

Finished!
It took me a while to finish them, but my first foam firearms are finished. Using textured floor mats and small pieces of foam isn't the best way to build these, so I plan to buy large, smooth sheets of foam for future projects. I should also learn to use an airbrush, and finally get the accessories I still need to get going.
As for the guns, they will see their first use next Elf Fantasy Fair, along with Tiff's Axe. Before that, I'm going to build a box for transporting them safely. I would hate to arrive in Arcen, only to find out my props got damaged in the trunk of my car.
Speaking of safety, it goes without saying you should use some common sense when travelling with realistic looking prop guns. Although these guns are fake, I can imagine not everybody would notice it and think they are real. So if you build stuff like this, keep them out of sight while on the road. To quote Harrison Krix from Volpin Props: "A convention is a good place to show off your work, a post office isn't"!

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Zombicide Machine Guns, part 1

Here's the second part of my Zombicide project! In the first part, I made a guitar axe. This time, I'm going to make the machine guns, one full sized Uzi-type gun and two identical mini-sized guns.

This is also my second attempt at making a video tutorial. The first one failed quite miserably. I'm not good at talking in front of a camera, and I forgot to take pictures besides video. Also, this will be a two part tutorial. The first part will deal with building the guns, the second part will be about painting them.

Materials and tools

• EVA foam floor mats (10 mm)
• 2 mm EVA foam
• PVC pipes, 20 mm and 35 mm diameter
• PVC foam plates, 2 mm and 5 mm
• MDF scraps, 10 mm and 3 mm
• Neodymium disc magnets
• Contact cement
• Super glue
• Wood glue
• Construction adhesive
• Hobby knife
• Rotary tool with flex shaft
• Belt/disc sander
• Heat gun
• Glue gun
• Band saw

The video
I recorded more or less the entire build on video, and this time I didn't screw up! Again, I shot waaaay more footage than I actually needed.
I removed the original audio and did a voice over. I'm not really good at talking in front of a camera. Apparently, my placeholder word for when I can't come up with the right word is "falafel". For example, "Next, I'm gonna drill two holes and glue in the... the... falafels with super glue." I used my phone as a voice recorder. It did a decent job, but I should invest in a decent microphone nonetheless.

Design
Before I could start building guns, I had to design something first. The easiest method would be using pictures of real guns and try to replicate them, but that would be a bad idea. I would end up with props that look way too realistic, even if I didn't replicate them perfectly. Conventions have quite strict weapon policies these days, and realistic looking weapons aren't allowed most of the time.
So I decided to design my own guns from scratch. I did use pictures of real weapons as a reference, mostly for getting the proportions right. I imported them into Inkscape and started drawing. I used an full size Uzi and a Micro Uzi as a reference, starting with the mini weapons. The most iconic part of the guns I was trying to mimic are the magazine in the grip, and the sights, so I made sure to include these. The magazine has an opening in the sides, showing the ammo inside.
Another feature I added was a muzzle brake. This is a sort of barrel extension with holes in it, and its purpose is to lighten the recoil of a gun. It's hardly ever found on this type of weapon, but it looks cool. I also wanted to make the magazine removable, both for ease of storage and transport, and for coolness.
After I was finished with the small gun, I used it as a base for the full size gun. I kept the grip, but enlarged the body and gave it a forward grip. Both guns also have an accessory rail on top, so in the future I can add stuff like high tech sights or other gadgets.
If you're interested in these designs, you can download them here for free. They are made using Inkscape, an excellent free cross-platform drawing program. The drawings are A0 and A1 size, so for printing you'll have to chop them up a bit. I had to cut them into A3 sized pieces for printing. I'm giving my designs away under the Creative Commons license, so if you use them, be a nice dude and give me some credit!

Full size machine gun, SVG file, 268 kb
Mini machine gun, SVG file,  242 kb

Getting started
I had ordered a band saw for this project, a tool I had been planning to buy for quite a while. Unfortunately, a few days after my order, I received an email from the store it would take a bit longer for the saw to arrive. The guns themselves kind of required a band saw, so in the meantime I got started on some of the small parts.
For the magazines, I didn't need the saw. They are made out of 10 mm EVA foam, sandwiched between a few layers of thick cardboard for stiffness and 2 mm foam. The bullets are made from a wooden dowel, painted with wood primer and brass spray paint. The sides got sanded flush on the disc sander, and an extra layer of foam was wrapped around the bottom of the magazine.
I wanted to make the magazines removable. To keep them in place when inserted into the gun, I put two small neodymium magnets in each magazine. I drilled two holes in the top, glued the magnets in place with super glue and then glue another layer of thin foam over it.

The sights and accessory rails are made out of 2mm thick rigid PVC foam. This material is easily softened with a heat gun and bent into shape; the different parts are glued together with super glue. For the adjustment screws on the sides, I simply cut the heads from a few screws using my Dremel and a grinding wheel, and glued them on with super glue.
The barrel consists of two pieces of PVC pipe. The barrel itself is a 20mm pipe, and the muzzle brake is a 35mm pipe. For the slots in the muzzle brake, I drilled a row of holes, cut the remaining plastic between the holes away with my Dremel and cleaned it up with a file. Another thing to add to my shopping list: a drill stand, because drilling a row of holes accurately isn't easy freehanded.
To fit the 20mm pipe into the 35mm pipe, I wrapped two layers of thin foam around it. This almost fit, but I still had a little bit of space left, so I wrapped some electrical tape around the foam until it fit firmly. The transition between the two pipes was then sculpted with Apoxie Clay. This is a two component sculpting medium that hardens into a rock solid mass that can easily be sanded, without shrinking or cracking.
A few discs made out of PVC foam, some more Apoxie and a few strips of thin EVA foam finished the muzzle brake. I did paint the interior black before I finished it, because it would be too difficult to paint it afterwards.

I wasn't really pleased with the barrels. The muzzle brake looked crappy, so I decided to start over. I used two pieces of PVC pipe again, but the other parts were 3D printed. Since I don't own a 3D printer, I headed to the makerspace at the Hasselt university and printed it there. The parts were modeled in Blender, an incredibly powerful free application, but with a steep learning curve!
The next day, a friend of me who runs a computer store told me he had a printer set up in his store for demos, and if I wanted something printed, I just had to send him the STL-file. I needed one more printed part for the barrel, and that's the part that connects the barrel to the gun itself.

The gun body
When my new band saw had finally arrived, I could get started on the gun body! I had already cut out the shapes I needed from my foam mats and sanded away the texture. For each gun, I needed 5 pieces of foam; the body is about 5 cm wide. With all the sanding, however, the foam was a bit less than 1 cm thick, so I used some 2 mm foam to bring it to the right width.

The handle needed a hole for the magazine. I glue three layers of foam together and then cut out the hole. Next, I drilled holes for the magnets (to keep the magazine in place), glued them in place and, after checking if everything fit, glued on the last two layers of foam.
Next, I cut the foam blocks into the right shape on the bandsaw. The upper part of the gun was easy, since these were all straight lines. The cuts were cleaned up a bit on the disc sander; special bandsaw blades exist for soft materials that produce a very clean cut, I should try to find one of those. The grip needed a bit more work, this was done with my Dremel and a sanding drum. I had to be very careful here not to sand away too much!

The raised details are all made out of 2mm EVA foam, cut with a hobby knife and glued into place with contact cement. The details on the handle were made by making a shallow cut and then heating it with a heat gun, causing the cut to open, and with a chainsaw sharpening bit in my Dremel.

Finishing touches
The trigger and trigger guard are made out of MDF scraps. Whenever I use MDF, I keep all the little scraps (well, not the tiny ones of course, anything bigger than the size of a playing card), they always come in handy for stuff like this. I used 10 mm and 3 mm thick MDF, wood glue and lots of cutting and sanding.
To install the trigger, I cut out a slot in the foam gun body and nudged it into place. I couldn't use contact cement for this, so I used a bit of construction adhesive. This has the added advantage to fill up any voids, so it bonds well even on a rough surface.

For the barrel, I carefully drilled a hole in the gun body. Since I don't have a 20mm drill bit, I enlarged it with my Dremel, until the barrel fit. Again, a bit of construction adhesive, and some hot glue. I was all out of super glue at this point, that's why I used the hot glue.

And then, some final finishing touches. I put the sights and accessory rails in place, drilled some small holes and put in some screws. The two last parts were the loading grip and the fire selector. The loading grip was also 3D printed, the fire selector is made out of MDF.

Coming up...
The next part will all be about painting and weathering the guns. They look quite silly and colorfull at the moment, but that's because I used craft foam sheets in all sorts of colors. Don't worry, the finished guns will look badass gunmetal grey with chipped paint, scratched metal and dirt!

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Tiff's Axe

This was supposed to be my first video tutorial. I had my camcorder with me all the time while I was working on this, and recorded about 100 gigabytes of raw video footage. However, when I was editing the video, I realized how horrible I am at speaking in front of a camera. At first it didn't sound that bad, but the longer I listened to myself blabbering the more I hated it. Sorry, it's just too embarrassing to put online. Let's just say I sound like a complete jackass. Of course, I didn't take any pictures, so for this post, screenshots of the video footage will have to do!

So what am I building? My wife and me both love the board game Zombicide, and the player characters of the game are perfect for cosplaying. This particular weapon is Tiff's axe, from the "Angry Neighbours" expansion. Besides the axe, she also carries a submachine gun, wich will be the next project! In fact, my next project will be three submachine guns, since I will be going as Doug from the base game (wich I'm pretty sure is based on Michael Douglas' character from Falling Down).

Materials

• Lumber, about 100x18mm (from my pile of leftovers)
• Bolts and nuts
• 2mm Steel rod
• Acrylic paints
• Wood varnish
• EVA foam
• Contact cement
• Book binding glue
• Construction glue
• Acrylic caulk
• 4mm PVC foam sheet

The handle
The axe handle is shaped like a bass guitar neck, complete with frets and tuning posts. To create a template, I used a picture of a bass guitar as a reference, along with the dimensions. I traced it in Inkscape, printed it and cut it out. Next, I traced the outline on a board of wood I had lying around and cut it out with a jig saw (wich I borrowed from my dad, since I don't have one myself).

The back of the handle had to be rounded with a hand plane. I had never used a hand plane before, and I was a bit clumsy with it from time to time. Luckily, the wood I used was quite soft and easy to plane. After planing, I used my bench sander to smooth the wood.

Like on a real guitar, the handle needed frets; simply painting on some lines wouldn't be good enough. I experimented with steel wire, nails and toothpicks a bit, without success. Then I found the perfect material in a local craft store: thin spring steel rods, about 2 mm. Very hard to cut (don't try wire cutters, it won't work, you need a grinding wheel), but it doesn't bend easily like normal steel wire. I cut slots in the handle where the frets would go with a hand saw and widened them a bit with a file.

Before I installed the frets, I painted the wood. I used regular acrylic paints, thinned down enough so the wood grain would still show through. The fretboard is painted in a dark brown, the rest in a lighter brown. I also painted on the markings on the fretboard and a biohazard symbol on the headstock using masking tape and a biohazard logo printed out and transferred with carbon paper.

Next, I gave the wood its first clearcoat and put the frets in place. I first cut lengths of the steel rods with my Dremel and a grinding wheel, and then rounded the ends a bit so there wouldn't be any sharp edges. To secure them into the slots I cut I used Tec 7, a construction adhesive that's strong enough to build skyscrapers. It comes in several colors, including brown, wich was perfect! I used a toothpick to put a bit in the slots, pushed the frets in and wiped away any excess that squeezed out. When they were all in place, I clamped another board on top of it and let it dry.

At this point, it still looked way too clean (not at all like something you've been carrying around in Zombieland for a while), so I applied some aging techniques. First, a dark brown wash all over the wood. This is the reason I clearcoated it first, because without it, the diluted paint would stain the wood too much. I just wanted a thin wash over the wood. After the wash, I drybrushed some light brown on the fretboard to make the color look a bit more fadedand when that had dried, a final clearcoat.

The blade
The axe blade is made out of 10 mm EVA foam floor mats, 4 layers sandwiched together. I had drawn a template in Inkscape, printed it (I'm so glad I have access to an A3-size printer) and transferred it to my foam. I cut the shapes out roughly and sanded the texture on the back away on my belt sander.

When the foam was sanded, I cut the pieces out a bit more precise (a few millimeters from the line I drew) and made a hole for the handle in two of the four pieces. To make sure the glue would stick to the handle properly, I sanded a bit of the paint off again.

For large surfaces like this, contact cement from a spray can works best. Also, the liquid cement I thought I still had had completely hardened because I didn't seal the can properly, so I didn't really have a choice. I first glued the two middle pieces, the ones with the hole for the handle, together, then one of the outer pieces, put the handle into place and finally the fourth layer.

The blade now was a single, solid block of foam. There was still a little gap around the handle, though. I fixed this with a bit of acrylic caulk. And I've probably already mentioned this before, but I'll say it again: make sure you've got acrylic caulk and not silicone, because you can't paint over silicone! Next came the messy task of sanding the blade into shape. Outer edges were done on the belt sander, inner edges with my Dremel and a sanding drum.

After the blade was sanded into the right shape, there were two things left. One, the cutting edge. I first cut away some foam with a knife, and then again to the belt sander. Two, there's a groove that runs across the blade. This was made by lightly scoring the foam with a knife, and then heating it with a heat gun, causing the cut to open up.

Painting
With the blade finished, there was one thing left to do: painting. As always with EVA foam, the most important thing is a good primer. There are lots of different methods, the most popular one being Plasti Dip, wich is hard to find here in Belgium, but my preferred method is a mixture of acrylic gesso and book binding glue. This adheres to the foam very well, and stays flexible so it doesn't crack.

I applied three layers of primer with a paint roller, and then a few layers of pure acrylic gesso over it. After it had fully dried, I sanded the entire blade, starting with 100 grit sandpaper and working my way up to 400 grit. That's why I used gesso on top of the primer. It's perfectly possible to paint directly over the primer, but the glue mixture, due to it's flexibility, can't be sanded very well.
After sanding and cleaning up the base coat, it was time for the actual paint job. First, a layer of gray spray paint, followed by a wash of dark gray. This was then clearcoated with a layer of matte varnish. On one of my previous projects, I painted on my metallic finish first and then clearcoated it, but this took away the metallic effect a bit, so this time, I clearcoated it first, and then drybrushed a thin layer of silver paint over it.

After the silver paint had dried, one last finishing - and messy - touch was needed: blood! I mixed some red and brown paint (pure red is way too bright and not really convincing), thinned it to a creamy consistency and then splattered it on with a brush. This is a messy process, and paint flies everywhere, so old clothes and lots of newspaper are a must for this!

The final result
There's one detail I added but forgot to document. My wife pointed out I forgot the tuning screws. I made these out of 4mm thick PVC foam sheet. I glued three layers together, carved and sanded them into shape, painted them and glued them in place.

And here's the finished axe in all it's bloody glory! Too bad the video I wanted to make didn't turn out the way I wanted it to. I still plan to make video tutorials in the future, though, but they probably won't involve me talking in front of the camera.

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