Link Removed. - Toyark Staff


The final prop replica I was tasked with creating was an iceball, similar to the kind Sub-Zero uses in the Mortal Kombat games. It was to be made the same way as the fireball. It had to light up and be mounted so it appeared as if it was shooting from your hand. Since I had already tackled the fireball, I was at least a tad more knowledgable at how to go about this.

The skeleton was made with aluminum foil. I actually made this skeleton much thinner than the one for the fireball. I did this so it allowed the lights to be more tightly packed together, giving a more even and brighter glow. But like with most things, there was a trade-off. Since the skeleton was smaller, that meant that I had to use much more hot glue on this than on the fireball to get it to the right size, making it heavier. Luckily it didn’t prove to be a problem. The light up circuit is the same as with the fireball. I used an LED strip found at Auto Zone and rewired it to hook it up to a switch and battery. I attached the curcuit to the skeleton and covered it all up with hot glue. I made sure not to cover the switch and left room for the battery compartment.

I actually had to do this ice ball in two parts. See, the lights needed to glow blue, but the light strip I was using had white LED’s, and I couldn’t just paint the outside of the ice ball clear blue, because that wouldn’t look very much like ice. So instead what I did was cover the whole thing with a layer of hot glue and paint that clear blue. Once I was satisfied with how the glow looked, I then proceded to add hot glue on top of that, Not only could you still see the blue from underneath with the lights off, but with them on it looked even more impressive.

As I covered it in glue I made sure to try and make it look like ice. I even gave it icicles dripping down from the head of the ice ball, just to give it that extra bit of realism. After all of the hot glue sculpting was finished, I made sure the wrist mount could fit in the end of it. Then I gave the entire thing a dry brushing with some flat white, to resemble frost. I made the end closest to your hand look the most frosted and kind of had it fade out over the entire thing. And even after that, the lights still looked very cool glowing from within. I was very pleased with how this turned out. I feel it turned out much better than the fireball, and hopefully if anyone ever asks me to make similar prop replicas in the future, I’ll have the full knowledge I need to imrpove upon this and make something even cooler. Get it? I’m sorry.