The Portal Project

Today was the day we decided to go ahead with trying to recreate the portals from the Portal videogame by Valve after seeing such a project on a website which I mentioned a few posts back. 

The first, most obvious, step in preparing to recreate these portals was the mirror aspect. 

We took after the guy in my previous post and purchased ours at Ikea.  It’s the one called Kolja (the name is odd because it’s Swedish).  If you don’t have an Ikea locally then you can either order one online or browse about stores in your area.  It’s just a basic reasonably sized oval mirror.  Nothing to complicated.

Our next worry was paint.  Anyone who’s worked with paint knows that you can only use certain types on certain surfaces  and if you’re not careful things can go awry.  We travelled to A.C. Moore and talked to the guy working in the paint section, and he directed us.

 

Since we did both portals and not just one, we needed two different shades of blue, and two different shades of orange.  For the blue we used Apple Barrel’s Bright Blue Acrylic Paint and Apple Barrel’s Carolina Blue Acrylic Paint.  For the orange we used Folk Art’s Pure Orange Acrylic Paint and Folk Art’s Tangerine Acrylic Pain.

Depending on your area you may not have access to these types or you may want to do yours a little different.  Don’t be afraid to ask those working there what types of paint you should use, that’s their job.

In regards to our method of getting the paint on the mirrors, we used sponges instead of brushes as to avoid streaking.  Most any store will have these, even your local Walmart.

If you’re doing this where you don’t want to get any paint on the floor, lay out some newspaper.  This should be common sense, but you’d be surprised.  NOW you are ready to begin.

We started with the blue and painted on the darker shade about a 1 1/2 inch thick border around the edge.  Don’t brush the border, but rather dab that was you can avoid streaking which will totally ruin the effect.  If you did it right, it should look something like the picture on the right.

Next we laid that aside and moved on to our other mirror, painting the darker shade of orange around the edge about 1 1/2 inch thick as well.  Remember that there’s no wrong way to do this.  Try and if you don’t like it, wipe it away with a paper towel before it dries and dry again.  It’s glass, so it comes off while wet relatively easily.  Also, if someone with my very limited creative ability can do this, you can too.  Notice:  Artistic little brother not included in Portal creation.

Now, here comes the hardest part in this whole shabang:  Waiting for the first coat to dry so you can add the second one.  Walk away, flip on the TV, and sit a while.  Or, be like Xavier and scarf popcorn, whatever…

We waited for about an hour before continuing.

Next we painted the outside edges with our lighter shades of blue and orange.  We only painted a little just to add effect, about a quarter of it.  When we had finished it looked like this:

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think they look pretty cool, and they’ll look ten times better when they’re up on the wall.  So yeah, that’s our Portal Mirror tutorial.  Good luck making your own =D