Manga series Sword Art Online focuses on you guessed it, swords, and Instructables user drjagCreations made the Elucidator for a commission. It’s a black weapon with gray trim that Kirito uses in the anime. drjagCreations said it’s a simple build using only a couple of power tools. He made it using a layering process rather than carving the sword from one piece and spent about 30 hours making the prop from MDF sheets, styrene, PVC pipe, and more. After the layers of the sword are glued together, they have to be sealed with epoxy and sanded as many times as necessary to make the weapon smooth. Here’s how he primed and painted the weapon:

To start with, the piece needs priming; this promotes adhesion for the paints that will be applied afterwards and gives a nicer surface to work on.

I recommend using 2 coats of high build primer to start with, once the coats have cured, they need sanding with high grit sandpaper, starting with 200 and 400 grit. repeat until smooth and apply 1 final coat of primer and sand with 800 grit; this will make the surface very smooth.

With the piece primed, you will now want to start adding paint. (I used flat black and silver) To start with, 2 coats of silver are sprayed all over the sword.

Once the paint has had time to cure, all areas which need silver edges were taped up with masking tape, this is so when the black paint is applied, the silver edge won’t be painted over. You need to be very patient with this and you need to be sure the masking tape is straight.

Once the tape is applied, 2 coats of flat black are applied to the sword. I suggest letting this set for a few hours before removing the masking tape. If there are any areas where the paint has “bleed”, (bleed means any paint that has leaked through the edge of the masking tape) you can touch them up with acrylic paints and a paint brush.

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