Christabel Simpson - Tank Girl Big Gun Design

Every Tank Girl needs her guns and I thought I'd talk a bit about mine. Like the hat, they were quite a time consuming part of my costume (mainly because I kept having to wait for paint to dry). The starting point was two water pistols from Poundland. I stripped away anything that looked too toy-like and sprayed them with matt black paint to prime them. After that, I dry brushed them with metallic paint, picked out a few details with a contrasting metallic paint and then glued on some gears. They ended up looking pretty good, but I had unwisely unscrewed the tank on the big gun for painting and shredded off loads of the paint putting it back on again. This meant I had to completely repaint it, along with a few other areas where the paint had chipped. Which brings me to my two top tips - don't dismantle your guns for painting and spray them with a fixative at the end of the project.

With the guns themselves finished, I turned my attention to the holsters. These were made from scraps of material from an old briefcase. I made patterns using outlines of the guns, stitched them together and added a snap fastening to each (also salvaged from the briefcase). I then stitched a belt loop to the big holster and rigged up a way of fastening the smaller one to my garter using hooks from one of my old bras. As I said it was quite a lot of work, but worth it.

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