N7 Mass Effect Armor Build: Guns: M77 Paladin & M3 Predator

So we wanted to make some guns to carry with our costumes. We decided to just go with pistols, since it was literally the weekend before Comic-con and they sounded fastest to make. I also wanted a pistol because it seemed easier to carry something small around rather then something big and bulky. And also my Shepard, who was a biotic, totally used pistols. The pistol I used most in game was the M77 Paladin, so I made that. And my husband Trevor made the M3 Predator cuz he just kinda liked the way it looked, and it is the standard default gun to go with his standard default armor.

We browsed a lot of other blogs on Mass Effect guns. Some people make them out of wood, and then do a mold and pour plastic. And while I think that looks GREAT, we did not have that kind of time. We decided to make ours just out of the same EVA Foam we used for the armor. Now I have also seen people make them out of foam but reinforce them with something rigid inside, but....eh, we decided to skip that and JUST do foam. Since pistols are smaller, this did not seem to be a big deal.

For both guns we went online, brought up a picture of the gun and used our projector to project an image onto the foam (much like we did with many of the armor pieces). We traced a general outline of the gun and cut it out. We did them several layers thick. For the M3 Predator the main body of the gun is 3 pieces thick, but the parts with details have an extra layer on each side of a total of 5 layers.

We used a combo of the dremmel tool and soldering iron to add the various detail lines.

For the M3 Predator we added black craft foam to the handle. We painted the 2 barrels of the gun black. Then we added 2 pieces of black PVC pipe to the front to act as the front barrel details. The red parts I just painted on with acrylic paint. And for the white letters I have a computerized machine that cuts self-adhesive vinyl so I made them out of that. Now it is a good idea if you are going to use vinyl to add a layer of some sort of clear coat on top, otherwise they do have a tendancy to start peeling off after 4 days of use. On my armor I just added a layer of Modge Podge over the vinyl, but I did not have time to do that to my gun. The white letters looked a little TOO white, so I got a dry paint brush and added the smallest amount of black paint and kinda dabbed some on.

For the M77 Paladin we used a very similar process. We did not need to use any craft foam on this one, we just painted parts of the handle with black acrylic paint. We sanded the edges with a dremmel tool to get that curved look. The Paladin is a thinner gun overall, but it felt like it was lacking some definition, but if we added more craft foam then it would for sure look too fat, so to get that definition we just used the dremmel tool to carve in the black part a bit where the handle meets the body. We used black PVC for the gun barrels, and also there is a piece on the back of the gun. And everything else is similar, vinyl letters, red acrylic paint details, and lines burned in with a soldering iron.