A while back, I was approached by ~RedxHarlxoxo over on Deviant Art asking if I could make a series of props for her Harley Quinn cosplay, which is amazing. Seriously, click the link above and go check our her Deviant Art page.
The first thing she requested was Harley’s popgun. You know me, so of course I accepted.
Now, just in case you’re not familiar with Harley Quinn, she’s the Joker’s “girlfriend” in the Batman universe. She’s a really cool and messed up character. If you want to know more, here’s her Wikipedia page. If you’re familiar with the Joker, or “Mistah J.” you might remember images of him holding a smoking gun with a “BANG!” flag coming out it, like this:
Well Harley has her own joke gun that looks like a simple cork popgun.
Her gun is pictured in either black or silver, and we decided to do the silver variant first. Yes, that does mean I’ll be building a second one of these in black later.
This also continues my trend of comically oversized weapons. I don’t know. I just attack that kind of crowd, I guess. AND I LOVE IT!
The base of the build would be my old friend PVC. A couple of connectors cut to the right length, a rounded cap, and a bit of Dermel work and you’ve got the main body of the gun. Sorry I didn’t get any pictures of this process. It was fast and messy with PVC dust and debris flying everywhere.
The grip, sight, trigger, and hammer were made from MDF and Poplar laminated together. The final result was pretty cool.
What’s up with the copper bit in some of the pictures you ask? Well, let’s just say when you’re doing a lot of painting, always put the lid back on the cans and if you don’t, test on something before assuming the color will be right.
There were some gaps and other issues, but my other friend Apoxy Sculpt helped me with those.
I know. I know I said we were doing the silver one first, but there are pictures of the black one up here. Well, I painted on the black first, then silver over it, and used steal wool and sandpaper to weather the silver by pulling the black back out.
Unweathered
Weathered
Some hand painting and more weathering and you get this.
Time to add the cork. How do you get an comically oversized cork? Well, I made one. I took the cork panels that you can glue to a wall and cut them into a series of circles. Then I just laminated them together and kept them under a clamp for 24 hours.
Once the glue dried, I sanded it down into shape.
All that’s left is to stick the cork in the gun and get it to it’s new owner.
Next up will be Harley’s big hammer!
