Building the M-3 Predator Heavy Pistol from Mass Effect 2 Part III: Painting and Wiring

When I last posted about this project, I had just finished casting it in solid urethane casting resin.  After cleaning it up a bit and filling in a few bubbles, I gave it a coat of black primer.  Then I sprayed the silver parts with Mirrorchrome paint from SpazStix.  That was covered with a satin clearcoat before I masked it off and picked out the black parts in satin black.  Then I went back and picked out all of the details by hand.


Here's the clean paintjob before weathering:



The weathering was simplicity itself.  Since I wanted the black parts to look like they were made of some sort of composite, I didn't add any scratch marks at all.  Instead, I just gave the silver portions a black wash to pick out the details and dirty it up a bit.  I'm pretty pleased with the results:



For the lights I just pressed masking tape over the holes and then poured clear casting resin into the holes from the inside.  Then I embedded a high-intensity blue LED into the resin between the holes so light would shine through both holes.  I think it worked out pretty well:



While it looks reasonably threatening all by itself, these pictures hardly do it justice.  So I turned to Jia Jem, a lovely cosplay genius with an amazing collection of outfits in her portfolio.  Her rendition of Jack (Subject Zero) seemed like the perfect model to showcase the finished pistol.  It turns out she was already contemplating another version of Jack based on some of the concept art by Matt Rhodes.  So this gave her an excuse to finish that up.


Here's the end result of the pairing:











She really did a great job and I couldn't be happier with the pictures.  She's also planning another photoshoot, so I'm looking forward to even more pics.