For those of you who are not aware, 'Nerf' is a Hasbro brand (to which I am in no way affiliated) of wonderfully pointless toys designed to allow children and adult-children (henceforth known as childults) to shoot one another with foam darts. Being that I'm a childult I was compelled to purchase one for both myself and my partner who was almost more excited than I was to have her very own Nerf pistol.
After getting home and wrestling our respective Nerf guns from their boxes, a half hour skirmish ensued - adult chasing adult with scant regard for knick-knack, item of memorabilia or tumbler glass. Later reflecting upon our chase we determined that it was much fun, 'But wouldn't it be cooler if they made Steampunk Nerf guns?' crooned my out-of-breath significant other. Turning to meet her enthusiastic smile I made an astonishing discovery: that Steampunk Nerf guns would be awesome, and how good was I for having thought of them? With this in mind I told her that 'I will make for us now Steampunk Nerf guns, so that we may use them and smile!'. Hence from that place I went and traversed the arduous space between the couch and the fridge, after which my machinations took shape once I'd polished off some delicious Sprunk. Ahem...
First thing is you start with a Nerf gun (or more as the case may be). You then have to take them apart so that you can see where you have to spray.
When spraying (I used Citadel Chaos Black spray) make sure that you get in all the nooks and crannies but not on any slides/frictive surfaces. This means spraying a single coat and then pulling everything back and spraying it, being sure to get every square inch. Leave them to dry for a couple of hours on a hook/peg/washing line/narcoleptic sloth.
Once they're dry the plan is to drybrush them (see my Terrain Boards Pt 4 tutorial for a guide). I used a rather large brush (about 1" [25mm] across), making it much faster to complete than you might think (a couple of hours it took me). I used a 'Tinbitz' metallic (I think) to paint the body, 'Chainmail' metallic to paint the barrels/detail and 'Burnished Gold' metallic for writing/crests. I built up a few layers of drybrushing and it turned out really nicely (just make sure you drybrush in all the corners [there are many]).
Here is a pic after the first round of drybrushing
The finished beasties (that said I'd like to add some brass engraved plates, copper tubes etc. but I wanted to make sure they still worked well and weren't just ornaments):
I couldn't help it...
I'd like to Steampunk some more items but with 1001 projects on my hands we'll see how that goes. Please feel free to comment and suggest Steampunk'able items or to add links to other cool Steampunk stuff, like this.
PLEASE NOTE: In no way do I endorse nor take responsiblity for any mods you make to any 'Nerf' brand foam projectile launchers and so on and so forth. On the side of each toy it says 'Do not modify darts or dart blaster'. You have been warned. Oh, and apparently if you live in the USA you should make sure that the tip of the barrel remains bright orange - something to do with legalities and safety etc. But then you wouldn't modify a 'Nerf' dart blaster, would you?
Cheers!
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