Ice Staff

Last year I got two of those plastic clear christmas bulbs because I wasn't certain which side would fit best on my first attempt at a mage staff. So I wound up having a second flapping about, taking up valuable "just dump crafting stuff here," space.

So I did the only logical thing I could, I made a second mage staff.

My first was all fire and wood, so for the second I wanted to go more ice and stone and I also wanted to make it light up.

Which meant that I needed to come up with a way mask a 9 volt battery and the connector. This is the scourge of all home haunters, where to hide the cursed power switches.

After painting the bulb with a blue enamel paint, working the LED's inside and gluing the whole thing together; I shaved and shaped down some styrofoam and cursed a lot waiting for the liquid nails to hold it to a 5 foot section of PVC pipe.

While that dried I used old photoshop to whip up some little spike dealies to adorn the headpiece. I printed them out on cardstock, glued and cut it out another three times or so to beef them up and then jammed them in.

To beef out the rest of the head piece I used tin foil and wrapped and shaped it to, well you'll see.

After covering the ball in protective saran wrap, I began the arduous task of latexing. (If you're curious how one goes about adding latex to things, you take a paper towel, drag it through liquid stinky shit, drip all over every surface you have, have your hands stick to the wall, curse ever being born, kick the bucket over, and get drunk.)

Slowly I worked down the staff, adding more tinfoil layers where I wanted some texture and then covering all that in more latex dipped paper towels.

Once that was all done, and I made sure it still lit up, time for the painting.

I started by covering the whole thing in a base black, a watery base black. Then I did variegating sponging of blues, white, and some black again.

To add a finishing touch, I wrapped some tennis tape around where someone would hold it and again painted that black because apparently people only sell white.

Unfortunately, because it's about 5 feet long it's hard to get a good picture of the entire thing.

And that's how I made my second ice staff. It's not too hard, just a lot of tedious work cursing at latex and then peeling layers of flesh off your hands each time you finish.