Here's another redo of one of my earliest Labyrinth projects. Ages back I made Hoggle's fairy sprayer, it was one of my earliest prop replica projects. I made it out of a Balloon pump, cardboard tubes, styrofoam spheres, clay, and craft foam.... which is basically how I made this updated version as well, I just did it a lot better this time around.
The screen-used sprayer showed up in a recent exhibition in Australia so with the help of Facebook I finally got my hands on some decent photo references:
For the wooden handle of my build I used some pieces of wooden candlesticks (Leftovers from earlier prop replica builds) and glued them together. Later on I coloured the wood with some watered down brown acrylic paint, with some chalk pastels dusted onto the edges for a bit of aging.
The body of the sprayer was made from a balloon pump, with a cardboard tube as an extender. The cardboard ring that helps to hide the joint between the balloon pump and the sprayer is the inner ring of a roll of washi tape, which just so happened to be the perfect size to fit around the larger cardboard tube. I slathered everything cardboard with multiple layers of wood filler, sanding it smooth between coats.
This obviously would've been a lot easier to do if I just started with a single PVC pipe to make the body of the sprayer, but I was pretty dead-set on reusing the balloon pump from my first Hoggle sprayer build. I've mentioned this before, but I like including pieces of the original prop replica in my redo projects as a "passing of the torch" thing (And also I just like knowing that my sprayer can actually spray out a puff of air when the handle is plunged).
The reservoir on the sprayer was made using one of those 3.5 inch wide poster shipping tubes, with a hole cut out for the cap. The cap was made from a juice bottle, which was pretty close to the shape of the screen-used prop (I just had to scrap off/sand down the little ridges on the side of the cap). I glued the threads of the cap into the shipping tube, so the cap can actually screw on and off (Not that you'd want it to, but fun to know it's an option).
The domed sides of the reservoir were made by stuffing styrofoam half spheres into those little plastic end caps that came with the shipping tube poster, with sculpey clay used for the little petal details and craft foam for the raised circles. I customized a clay cutter for the petal shapes so they'd all be super consistent, I found one that was a fairly close rounded rectangle and then tapped with my hammer around a wooden dowel to taper the shape.
The little detail on the top of the sprayer (Which I theorize is meant to be a stylized representation of a fairy) was made of more sculpey clay. The front piece of the sprayer (Where the nozzle fits into) was a leftover floor protector from some shelves I bought that just so happened to fit perfectly, and the nozzle is the nozzle from the balloon pump which I trimmed down.
The two tubes fit together with a wooden dowel. For the paint job I used a filler primer spray, Rustoleum metallic gold spray paint, and then applied some aging with a custom mixed acrylic paint. Last thing I did was apply a bit of gold gilder's wax, and I was done!
Really happy with these photos, it really goes to show what the magic of proper lighting and a bit of photo editing can do to elevate a prop replica. The bricks were just pink insulation foam cut to shape and glued onto some dollar store foam board, the "dirt" are some dollar store yoga mats that I covered in multiple layers of glue and sand... the vines and leaves were craft store finds, and the fairy was some iridescent film ironed around some wire, and glued to a small spherical LED described as a "Balloon light" in the listing I purchased from. Every shot had at least 2 or more shots combined with it to duplicate the fairy (And I also took some shots with an additional balloon light glued to a stick that I'd hold close to the sprayer so I could get those additional light reflections from the fairies).
