My Wife's Build (A little something medieval, a little something scales, a little something.........)

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Elcorio

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Hello all. After building my own set of ODST armor using the pep foam files, my wife and I attended our first con together. She normally is not "in" to all this "dress up" stuff, but after seeing the positive impact my armor had and how much fun it was, she tells me that she wants something for her, but not all spacey / futuristic looking and all.

So this puts me on a road I have never been on, but am anxious to travel. I decided on a ranged DPS type caster character build for her, but have no intentions of trying to duplicate a specific character. Plan is to shoot completely from the hip on this and figure it out as I go. I have a mental image of what I want to do and the attached pics are merely what I have tried so far before jumping in head first with her breastplate.

This thread will probably be fairly quiet for now as I figure out exactly where I want to go with it, but will update it as I get more solid or final pieces done.

Wish me luck!
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Luck friend.

Are you using pre-made foam scales or is that a bag of carpal tunnel?

I'm cheating. I saw on some Facebook foam cosplay pages I follow where a lady used a guitar pick punch to make them. So yeah, making the scales is pretty easy. Contact cementing them down is a whole other task though. Playing with colors right now to see what color pallet to go with.
 
Dude. Super glue sounds more friendly to me, I think. I an a fan of contact cement, but super glue will be quicker.

I did contemplate that, just worried about the longevity of it holding. I think I will make another test piece and go that route to test durability.

I see scales and I start picturing Red Sonja. I don't think your wife will be too impressed if you present her with a scale mail bikini though...

She's a cop, so only full body armor for her. Not like she's a stranger to wearing actual body armor! LOL.
 
Being a melee kind of guy, I wasn't really feeling the whole sorcerer thing, so the wife is just going to have to settle for some type of dragon based armor. Why? Because I think it looks cool and since I am building it, she's getting what I build. LOL!

The beauty in not following any one pattern is that I am completely free to build it as I see it. With that being said, the first bracer is done but feels too plain to me. I want horns and nubs coming out of the scales and leather and.......well, I believe you get the picture. So this piece will be chalked up as a plausible design and OK, but it either needs something more or I will go back to the drawing board. I also started compiling images of dragons and other armor designs following that genre as references to kind of pick and choose what I like about different aspects. It is far removed from a HALO type build, but some of the things I learned from that have already paid off on this one.

I suppose its hard to convey the exact look I'm trying for because I see it in my mind and am not artistic enough to draw it out.

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She's a cop, so only full body armor for her. Not like she's a stranger to wearing actual body armor! LOL.

Well, I see your point about her being used to wearing body armor being a cop.......but I think you missed
PaiganBoi's point. How would you feel if she wore a body armored bikini to work?........I think that might be a conflict of interest. But that's just me.......Thong or full coverage back?.......just asking. Might get shot in the posterior......it's still a gun shot wound.......
 
So the problem with having a very generalized idea of a build is that with each turn a new idea develops. Those gauntlets look great right!? Know what would make it look better? Small dragon horns on it. Buggers!

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The helmet? Well, you see....what happened was.......knowing that I am not at the skill level to pull off a helmet as evidenced by my repeated fails at an ODST one, I used Evil Ted's Inquisitor helmet pattern as a base. Added some larger horns, some scales, and this is where I got to.

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While not all that bad IMO, to me it looks like a medieval version of the red bird from the popular angry birds game. I'll still complete it just for the experience and keep some of the ideas like the cheek/face plates, but I want to completely rework the top. Alright, back to the drawing board!
 
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If you are looking for base pattern check out Kamuicosplay. She has female breastplate, pauldron and born bundle selling on her website.

PaiganBoi As the saying goes: "Great minds think alike" and you and I seem to have great minds because that is exactly what I did. For just a few dollars, I got her horn and breastplate patterns and it has saved me mountains of time in building the base versus trying to "figure" it out as I go.

Now that some paint has been added, I like the helmet a bit more. I also thought the paintball mask I painted completed the look, but the wife doesn't want anything covering her face when in costume.

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Started on the breastplate last night and plan to incorporate velcro on the back side to allow for easier access to donning the piece. I'll also start pulling a variety of reference images from a multitude of various games to try to get a design idea.

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The build on this project has been quite slow and cumbersome. While I had a general idea of what I wanted to do, creating everything from scratch has proved to be more time consuming than originally thought. Mainly because every time I get halfway through with a sections, I see something that I like better and start over. Kudos to anyone out there that has the patience to create patterns!

That and there was also a motorcycle vacation with the fellas thrown in there as well!
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The initial helmet came out great..........but...........it was to big for my wife to wear. Grrrrrrr......back to the drawing board and this is what I came up with. It still needs some finer detail work, sealing, paint, etc., but the size is right this time and I like the directions it is going.

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Work on the wife's build has been going painfully slow, but here is a little photo dump of the progress. Punching out individual scales and securing them to the chest piece is quite time consuming, but the look I am shooting for is coming along nicely with attention to detail and perseverance.

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By the numbers: there are six "panels" on the chest piece. It takes roughly 200 (+/-) individual scales to make up a panel which means, that dang thing will be rocking close to 1,200 scales once done!

To cover the breast area, I bought a couple yards of faux black leather and will tie that in to that area and bring it up over the shoulder to the back where the scales stop. I decided to make her a gladiator style skirt and will use the same faux leather backed with 2mm foam to make each pleat. Conchos and a simple template were added to give the pleat more character.

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Now for the crowning jewel and where I have probably spent the most time this far. The helmet! I have to admit, I REALLY LOVE the way this came out and it has truly pushed my skill level. In my ODST thread, I talked about building a vac-form set up for my visor and never got around to it. When I decided to "add" lenses to her helmet, I could not find anything that would fit or would look good. SOOOOO, the vac-form got built and I made a buck for the lenses using a scrap piece of 2X4.

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I first covered the .020 PETG with smoke colored vinyl then threw it in the toaster oven. The pull worked well with the vinyl covered PETG, but tiny bubbles formed between the vinyl and plastic. So I will need to work through that. My first thought is moisture between the layers since I didn't let it dry and cure before heating it. I have more smoked vinyl on order. The sanding "fuzzies" were driving me crazy and nothing I did would get rid of them. So right now I am going the multiple mod podge layer route and have already started wet sanding the helmet smooth. No more fuzzies!!! YEA!!!

Either way, the lenses came out awesome and so far so good.
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Going to call this helmet done now. I tried making another set of lenses, but this time I let the translucent vinyl cure for a few days and when it went into the oven to vac-form, I slowly brought the temperature up to "cook" off any moisture that may have still been sandwiched in there. After about 10 minutes at a decent temp. (200 degrees), I ramped it up to 350 to soften of the PETG and vac-formed the lenses.

SI3RRA 117 Just an FYI: That blue/green vinyl on top of PETG and vac-formed did extremely well. The pieces are small, but I will try a larger pull at a future date.

You can see the lenses in the video here:

 
Going to call this helmet done now. I tried making another set of lenses, but this time I let the translucent vinyl cure for a few days and when it went into the oven to vac-form, I slowly brought the temperature up to "cook" off any moisture that may have still been sandwiched in there. After about 10 minutes at a decent temp. (200 degrees), I ramped it up to 350 to soften of the PETG and vac-formed the lenses.

SI3RRA 117 Just an FYI: That blue/green vinyl on top of PETG and vac-formed did extremely well. The pieces are small, but I will try a larger pull at a future date.

You can see the lenses in the video here:


That helmet is epic looking. Awesome work!
 
Going to call this helmet done now. I tried making another set of lenses, but this time I let the translucent vinyl cure for a few days and when it went into the oven to vac-form, I slowly brought the temperature up to "cook" off any moisture that may have still been sandwiched in there. After about 10 minutes at a decent temp. (200 degrees), I ramped it up to 350 to soften of the PETG and vac-formed the lenses.

SI3RRA 117 Just an FYI: That blue/green vinyl on top of PETG and vac-formed did extremely well. The pieces are small, but I will try a larger pull at a future date.

You can see the lenses in the video here:

THis is good news!! I still haven’t finish up my buck for the Deadeye visor. Which I was planning to test this stuff.
Helmet looks amazing!! hard to believe it is foam, it looks so sculpted.
 
Chest piece and shoulders are done for the wife's build and now starting on the gauntlets. Shoulders and gauntlets are completely freehand designed.
While I love the way my ODST came out, I am really digging this build as I am not bound by any one genre. Now that I have a better understanding of Armorsmith (thanks TurboCharizard for the write up!), I think I will try to replicate the same build I did for my ODST for my youngest son, just on a slightly smaller scale. Figure I will use 3/8" & 1/4" foam for his.

Enjoy the pic update! Cheers!

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Been busy building all kinds of other knick knacks for other people, so now its time to get back to this build. Fit test is done and there are a couple of things that became apparent. The hip plates will need more curvature and definitely some padding in the helmet. I don't really care for the initial sword design, so I will more than likely redesign that and save this one for something else. I made a dragon scale template and dry brushed the antique copper on the brown pleat portions of the skirt, as well as created waist panels on the belt itself the same way. The shield hand is bare right now, well....simply because she will be carrying the shield. :lol:

Sword, shield, and fine tuning is all that is left to do!
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