Golden Blaster Award statuette.

I was hired by the organizers of this years EuroCon, Shamrokon, held in Dublin on the 22th-24th of August, to create 4 statuettes for their annual short Sci-Fi film festival, called the Golden Blaster. I worked with one of the heads of the con to create the look of the blaster.

Each aspect of the blaster had mutability designs done of them, & he choose which he liked best. They were then collected all into one design, had it okay'd & then set about creating.

The master prop was build from balsa wood as I've worked with it on other similar project like this in the past, so I'm comfortable working with it. The fin, body & handle were all carved out of the material separately & then glued together.

The nozzle & back end were then carved up & attached, then the whole body was covered in polyfiller, sanded to a smooth finished & primed.

The next stage was to mold the blaster as I needed to make four copies of it. This is always the scariest part of prop building for me & the messiest. If anything goes wrong during this part of the build it will damage the master prop, but it will also cost me a fortune in materials. Seeing the shape of the blaster this had to be a two part mold.

I clayed up and boxed in the first half. This can normal take between two & three hours to set up as you make sure that the clay is level, you got the mold at the halfway mark & all the edges are perfectly done so that there will be no silicon leaked. I used Supersil 20 Silicone for the mold. It is a 10:100 mix silicone & one that I have used before & I've always been happy with the results.

Happily, after 12 hours of curing, the mold turned out perfect. It was then a simple matter of, cleaning up the master prop, reapplying some poly-filler that had come off in the clay, flipping everything over & casting the second half.

I then did a test cast, using the fast cast polyurethane 1:1 resign I have used many a times in the past. I sloshing some of the resin around the mold to both clean it out & see how well it nozzle preforms. Once I was happy with that it was a simple matter of casting four of the blaster, priming each one and then  painting them up. Three of the statuettes need to be gold & one silver. I found a wonderful spray paint called "Hardcore", which comes in a multitude of colours as well as chrome silver & shinny gold, which is the look I wanted.

Once the painted had cured I coated them all in a few layers of Gloss Varnish to seal them in & brought them down to a trophy shop the Con directors where using to have their bases fitted. The next time I saw them was at the convention on display.

I was pleased with how these turned out & with the positive reaction people had when they saw them at the Shamrokon. I''m starting to feel like making prop ray-guns could be my main field of interest over the next while =]

-M