How to make a district 9 Weapon

Step 3 Measuring up

Now to work out how big this thing is going to be. The photo of Wickers carrying the weapon gives us a starting point for scale. Do the classic artist thing of holding a pencil up to the image and marking with your thumb the length of his forearm. Compare this to other parts of the image and you will see that the stock and the barrel are pretty much the same length. Now measure the length of your own forearm and you've got a pretty good place to start.

To take this further you need to resort to some other method. I loaded the image into paint.net and drew a selection box around barrel of the gun. This told me it was 416 pixels long, the length of my forearm is 350mm long so therefore the image has a scale of 1 pixel to 0.8mm. By moving the selection box around the image I was able to measure virtually all the parts of the gun separately. I have included a quick doodle of my results and also a snapshot of my logbook containing more of my measurement details