Part One: The Corset
Part Two: The Skirt and The Boots
Part Three: The Main Armor Pieces: The Breastplate and the Backplate ***You are here***
Part Four: The Accessory Armor Pieces: The Shoulders, The Armbands, and the Kneeguards
Part Five: The Weapons
Part Six: The Hair, The Eyes, The Makeup and Playing The Part
PART THREE
THE MAIN ARMOR PIECES: THE BREASTPLATE AND THE BACKPLATE
All right. It's time to get for realsies about this. The armor was the place where I was venturing out into new territory, I'd never made armor before. I learned a lot, and have a lot of ideas for how I'd do this differently. So I'll do my best to give you a solid idea on what to do, and how to avoid mistakes I made.
I planned to work in Worbla covered EVA foam, which is how kamuicosplay.com did hers, and it seemed doable. If you need shopping sources, try here:
Honestly, Svetlana of Kamui Cosplay has done an excellent job collecting resources. Why work harder than I need to?
I was super nervous about working with Worbla, I'd never done it before, and sure it sounds simple, but every new material has a learning curve. I hadn't worked with EVA foam either. I got my foam from some extra floor tiles Cari had bought some time ago and didn't need.
Materials:
about 4 medium sized sheets of Worbla (this should be all you need for the whole project, future material lists that mention Worbla are assuming you're taking from the Worbla you already bought.)
2 standard floor tiles worth of 10mm EVA foam
5mm craft foam
2mm craft foam
2mm craft foam
SHARP Xacto knife
SHARP box cutter
dremel with a sanding or grinding bit. I found a tapered grinding bit easiest to work with.
safety glasses
dust mask
heat gun
sculpting tools
contact cement
pleather scraps for straps
10-20 4 pronged flat antique bronze studs
heat proof place to work with the Worbla- more on this in a moment.
cutting mat
wood glue, gesso or primer of choice for smoothing the Worbla
sand paper in multiple grits- medium to ultra fine
6 D rings for attaching straps
black Plastidip spray
Antique Gold Rub N Buff
black acrylic paint
Optional- airbrush and black airbrush paint
clear spray varnish
So, lets start with some patterns.
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| https://www.instructables.com/id/Xena-Costume/ |
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| https://www.instructables.com/id/Xena-Costume/ |
There are also two small side pieces on the breastplate that the side straps attach to, I didn't have a pattern for this, so I just freehand sketched one.
Many, many times.
Using screenshots I made some vague guesses at approximate proportions for sizing. I figured the back should be about 12" across and the front should be about 14". I realized later this was a little too big for the breastplate, but not until after I was done. I took these patterns and uploaded them to https://rasterbator.net where I could adjust the size to print it at exactly the size I needed on however many pages it needed. From what I've heard this is a thousand times easier to do with Photoshop, but I don't have that, so this was my budget option. It made nice easy split up PDFs for me to print and use to trace everything onto my EVA foam.
I separated out the breast cups, I knew with the embellishments on those I wouldn't want to use the thick foam for that, I'd want nice thin 2mm foam, so I only traced the bottom part onto the thick foam. I also realized I wouldn't be able to carve the small scrolly details on the back piece out of the foam with any hope of success, I'm just not that good, so I only traced the major shapes of the back.
So, cutting these things out is where you need the SHARP blades. And I'm going to continue to capitalize SHARP. I know foam seems nice and soft, but if your blades aren't SHARP they are just going to tear and shred the foam rather than cut it. I suppose you can smooth is out when you get to the dremelling but why make more work for yourself?
So. Cut out your foam pieces. They're going to be blocky and angled so that means we're going to need to round that out, and the best way is with a dremel.
***PLEASE NOTE*** For GOD'S SAKE wear safety equipment. Eye protection and a dust mask. SERIOUSLY. I know you don't want to, only nerds wear safety equipment. But nerds also get to keep their vision and prevent their lungs from being coated in black foamy dust. You're going to make so much super fine foam dust and you will absolutely breathe the hell out of it. And then lets talk about how much of that dust is going to get in your eyes. You like seeing things? You want to keep seeing things? You won't be able to with this dust flying everywhere. I'm not kidding. Don't brush this off as paranoia. Wear safety equipment.
So, dremeling is really kind of a sculpting situation, you're just going to need to soften and round the sharp edges and make everything nice and curly, and you're just going to have to feel it out until you think it looks right. In the end I wish I had carved more to give everything a sharper ridge down the middle, but it still looked good.
Pay no mind to the foam chakram, we'll cover weapons later.
For the breast cup pattern I originally planned to use the duct tape circle I had cut out of my original corset pattern, but upon looking at it it seemed too small and flat. (Sad face when I think about the fact that it's an actual duct tape model of my bust. Sighhhhhh.) So I took a 6" foam ball and covered it with painter's tape to make a half sphere pattern, which ended up too spherical (weird, right?) so I eased the shape a bit by cutting small slits and filling them with tape, and came up with a nice cup shaped pattern after cutting new slits so it could lay flat.
I cut it out of 2mm craft foam and glued the edges together with contact cement. There's really isn't a better glue for foam.
I'm afraid I can't give you a solid pattern for this, bust sizes vary so much, you're really going to have to adjust this for your size. I'm just hoping my explanation is clear enough. Just keep in mind, you do want this part to be a little bigger than your actual bust size. It's armor after all, such as it is, and it doesn't need to be skin tight.
Once I had all the foam pieces ready to go, it was time to cover everything in Worbla. I was super nervous here, cutting and dremeling foam was pretty easy and I'm not totally unfamiliar with foam, but Worbla is a whole new thing. I had played with it a bit back in February, when we did the Mario Villains, Shy Guy's mask was made out of this. But that was very simple.
So, you'll need a heat gun, of course. Heat guns are cheap and easy to find, mine is something like a $10-20 one I found on ebay or Amazon. I honestly can't find the purchase anymore so I'm not sure. Maybe it was Walmart? Anyways, they're cheap and simple, you don't need anything fancy. However, more important is your workstation. There's a few issues with Worbla you'll need to be ready for. First of all, this is gonna get hot. The tip of the heat gun gets severely hot and will burn you or anything it touches instantly. Be very very careful with that. Also, Worbla is sticky when it's heated and will want to stick to whatever it can. Having a good place to work the Worbla is going to be very very helpful. So, based on this tutorial:
I bought a foam core poster board from the dollar store and a roll of silver foil insulation tape from the hardware store. It's intended for working with HVAC systems, if that helps you find it. I wanted to get some anyways because I had seen tutorials saying it's great for metallic sword blades, but after playing with it a bit I feel like it's too easily dented and would require too much meticulous patience to get it smooth. I don't know, I still have some, maybe I'll make a test sword and try it out sometime.
Anyways, I covered the poster board in the foil tape, and boom. Nice metallic surface to work with hot Worbla. It will protect my table or carpet or whatever I'm working on and Worbla doesn't stick to it as badly as it does other things. Don't get me wrong, it definitely does stick, and you'll probably want to be a little careful how hard you press on it into the foil, but as long as you make sure to periodically lift your piece up and de-stick it, you won't have a problem.
Look how pretty they look before I started beating the hell out of them. The smaller one is a poster board cut in half and stacked on itself for extra thickness, I worried the big one would be too thin, and I later found it nice to have a smaller one to work with for maneuverability every so often. This project made my kitchen table unusable for a month, since it was my primary workspace, and there frequently wasn't even enough room for everything I needed to work on. The big one was good when I just needed more room for the bigger pieces. And after working with it, it wasn't too thin. It definitely does heat up with the heat gun, since it is metallic, so keep that in mind. It will help your Worbla heat evenly and not cool too fast, but it will also absolutely burn you if you rest your hand on a hot spot.
Fair warning, you will burn yourself. A lot. I definitely did. I'd have loved some kind of heat resistant gloves, but where do I find gloves thin enough to still maintain my dexterity and ability to sculpt, thick enough to be durable and actually resist the heat, and nonstick so I'm not fusing my gloves to the Worbla? Nowhere, I'm pretty sure. So I just had to deal with it. I was as careful as I could be, but I spent most of my Worbla-working time in a half-scorched state. My boyfriend learned not to respond to my frequent profanity outbursts, it just meant I got scorched and I wasn't going to stop.
This is why you need sculpting tools, they will help save your fingers a lot if you can use them instead of your hands. I work with polymer clay pretty often so I just had a set of basic sculpting tools around. If you don't, you could also use a butter knife or edge of a spoon or flathead screwdriver. Be creative, I'm sure you have some kind of objects around the house you could use to shape the Worbla. Or, you know, just burn yourself repeatedly. That works too.
Moving on.
So, I traced my armor patterns onto the Worbla, just rough outlines with a little extra around the edges, two for each piece. We will need one for the front and the back of each armor piece, we will be sandwiching the foam between them. No need to cut out details right now, we'll do that in a minute. I cut out the pieces using a pair of old fabric scissors that got demoted to general crafting scissors when I bought some nice new fabric scissors a while ago.
Full disclosure- cutting out all the Worbla for this costume destroyed those scissors. I don't know if it was a result of cheap scissors, or Worbla is just really tough and they weren't designed for that, but I had to throw them away when I was done. The screw that held the two pieces together got completely stripped.
So, once I had my Worbla pieces, I would heat up one piece until it was soft and floppy, and then press the foam piece into it, flat side down. Then I'd flip everything over so the foam was facing down, and gently press the worbla down into the details of the foam piece. Not too hard here, since this is the back of the piece I really just wanted the back Worbla to rise to meet the front when I put it on, so the front Worbla piece didn't have to do all the covering work.
Then, before the back Worbla was completely cool, I'd heat the front Worbla and press that over the front of the piece, pressing that down into the details of the foam gently with my fingers. You might need to hit the back Worbla again with the heat gun to make sure it's still warm, you need both pieces to be warm so they will fuse together. Make sure you seal the outer edges of the seam together, and start pressing down the edges of the details more firmly. Keep the heat gun nearby, you will need to reheat frequently. Use the sculpting tools to really press the Worbla firmly around the foam, we're going for a perfect fit now. Shape your curves, find all your edges, and make sure the front and back Worbla pieces are firmly attached to each other around all parts of the foam. You want a solid Worbla shell around the foam core.
I'm sorry I don't have more pictures of this process. It was pretty hands on and intense, since I'd never done it before. I'm afraid I didn't really think to take pictures.
Now you'll want to trim off all the extra. You can use scissors around the outer edges, and make sure to reheat and smush the cut edges so they blend seamlessly together, but for the finer details you'll probably want to use an Xacto knife.
This part is a bit tricky. You don't want to cut it on your Worbla work board, you will destroy it so fast, since it's just foil tape and poster board. So I used a self healing Xacto cutting mat. However, hot Worbla really really really wants to fuse itself to the plastic of that mat. Also, in my experience, if the Worbla is too hot, it just squishes instead of cutting, but if it's too cold it's really firm and hard to cut. So this part is an elaborate dance of heating the Worbla, moving it to the cutting mat, cutting a small section, lifting it up to disconnect it from the cutting mat, setting it down, cutting a bit more, lifting it up, repeating until it gets too hard to cut, moving it back to the Worbla work board, reheating, but being careful to not to do much, and going back to the cutting mat. It's maddening. Maybe you can come up with a better way to do that, but I couldn't. So that's what I did.
Keep fresh blades for your Xacto knife on hand by the way. This is difficult enough without fighting a dull blade.
Eventually you will have removed all the excess Worbla and smoothed all your seams and you now have some lovely Worbla covered pieces. While the pieces are still warm you can also press them to your body to mold them to your shape, you don't want them to be flat of course. The breastplate I could just do myself, for the backplate I just heated it and then laid on the floor and asked my daughter to gently press it over the curve of my back. A dressform would also work for this, which I do have, but she's kinda bulky and I just didn't feel like getting her out. Also, don't curve the back piece until you've added the smaller details, which I will cover in a moment.
In case you've never worked with Worbla before- SAVE ALL YOUR SCRAPS! Every scrap can be reheated and reused, and small pieces can be squished together and used basically like clay, which we will do more than once with this project. Worbla's expensive, don't waste it. It's all useful.
So, this is what the bottom of my breastplate looked like when I'd finished this stage:
That is... not right. It's definitely not supposed to be that flat. I needed to add some dimension to it. So to start with, I melted down some Worbla scraps, rolled them into snakes and outlined each hole with it.
That's.... better. But as you can see I didn't yet really understand the shape of the armor. The big vertical hole is supposed to flow up and around the two side holes, not be separate pieces. So I actually took a hacksaw to the middle of those two bumps in the top center and cut all the way through to the vertical hole, trimmed off a sliver of each side at the top and then heated it up and used the Worbla to fuse it back together again. This had the effect of bringing the two side holes closer together. I then added more Worbla snakes to the edges to make it flow more smoothly. This took a lot of time, a lot of sculpting and smoothing, and a whole lot of finger burns. Worbla snakes are the worst for burning yourself, they have to be so hot to roll out. But in the end it looked like this:
Those are some much more natural flowing curves. I still could have improved it further, but I'd had enough of burning myself sculpting Worbla at this point so I called it good. I knew priming and sanding would even a lot of that out.
For the back piece, at this point I only had the major shapes at the moment. So basically what I did was I laid my piece on top of the paper pattern, made more Worbla snakes, and arranged them carefully for all the additional little curlicues. It worked very well.
I will note though, the heat gun scorched the paper pattern very quickly, my pattern definitely had some golden brown edges after just a few seconds of the heat gun when I was trying to heat the places where I was attaching the curlicues.
I also added the D rings here, I just made a small rectangle of Worbla that I fed through the D ring, folded in half and squished together and then attached to the underside of the sides and top curves based on where it looked like the straps attached in screenshots. You can just wrap the D rings in painter's tape when you get to painting later on.
I used this same Worbla covering method for the curvy parts off the side of the breastplate, and the breastplate cups. The cups required some clever pinching and trimming of excess Worbla to make sure there weren't weird lumps, and I also used the 6" foam ball I'd used earlier to make the pattern for the cups to roll the Worbla around so it would have a nice rounded shape. Attaching these pieces to the lower part was pretty straightforward, I just heated the edge of the cups and the top edges of the lower part, held it up to myself to make sure the spacing was correct and even, and stuck them together. I added some extra Worbla to the ends of the side pieces so I could stick that to the underside of the cups on either side, and also formed that to myself while it cooled. In the end, I had this:
I realize you can barely see the side pieces, but they're there. Again, intense process that didn't really leave me a lot of thought for pictures. You can see there are a few folds in the Worbla on the cups, but there's some pretty major embellishments on those cups, so none of that is going to show.
It was so satisfying to hold this up to myself, it's molded perfectly to my bust and my ribcage, and it just fits so nicely! I added D rings to the side pieces as well and at the top of the cups I added a tab of Worbla that I formed around the copper wire I was planning to use for the squiggly wire pieces that attach the breast plate to the shoulders. Once it cooled a bit I removed the wire and just left little Worbla tubes that I would hook the wire through again later after painting was done.
Next up I needed to add the decorations to the breastplate cups. This part was not super easy. The pattern I used for the breastplate has the designs as a formless bundle of lines that were of no use to me. So I covered the cups in painter's tape and sort of freehand sketched the designs on there while carefully referencing many different screenshots. Once I had something I liked, I removed the tape and cut out my patterns
For the record, I wish I had made the big piece a bit thinner and the small crescents just a little smaller. Just something to keep in mind for your own patterning.
I cut these out of 10mm EVA foam, realized that that was super unnecessary for the crescents, it would be a thousand times easier to just mold them out of Worbla scraps, dremeled the big pieces down to be all smooth and rounded at the edge, and promptly realized that the 10mm foam was gonna be wayyyyyy too thick. It might have been manageable but adding Worbla wasn't exactly going to make them smaller. So I went out and got some 5mm foam and redid the cutting and dremeling. It looked much better. I encased everything in Worbla just like I had done with everything else, and immediately realized I had the same flatness issue I'd had with the lower part of the breastplate. So I solved it the same way, more Worbla snakes carefully pressed and sculpted into the piece.
You can see the difference it makes. However, this did end up making them much thicker, and it actually ended up nearly as thick as the 10mm foam. Were I to redo this part, I would carve and shape the 10mm foam way down more to get those ridges without adding more Worbla. That would solve the thickness problem because I'd have to carve so much more off to do that. The other issue my method caused was that the Worbla was so thick on those ridges that it made it very difficult to heat all the way through when I needed to attach these to the breastplate cups. All I needed to do was heat up the decorations and the cups and press them in place, but I had to spend a long time heating it to get everything to bend and mold around the cups. It all still looked good in the end, but the designs are still too thick to be truly accurate.
I made some small snakes of Worbla, almost Tootsie Roll shaped but a little thinner, that I pointed at either end and shaped in a ridge across the middle for the little crescents and just pressed them in place according to the screenshots I was working with. I feel like I could have made these smaller as well, but they matched the rest of the designs.
Incidentally, your patterns for the designs can tell you where to place the designs, just tape the patterns back to the breastplate cups and trace the outlines with a sharpie or something. It'll show you right where to stick the designs, and it's all going to be painted anyways, so it really doesn't matter if you draw on it.
Basically, overall I'm not upset about the final shape of my breastplate, but it really could have benefited from a lot more time with the dremel to get the foam base to the correct shape, rather than trying to correct it with more Worbla later. It also ended up a bit too large just in general, so I would size down just slightly on my pattern as well. I made it about 14" across, I'd probably go for more like 12". Just little nitpicky things, nothing earth shattering.
Next up I needed to add the decorations to the breastplate cups. This part was not super easy. The pattern I used for the breastplate has the designs as a formless bundle of lines that were of no use to me. So I covered the cups in painter's tape and sort of freehand sketched the designs on there while carefully referencing many different screenshots. Once I had something I liked, I removed the tape and cut out my patterns
For the record, I wish I had made the big piece a bit thinner and the small crescents just a little smaller. Just something to keep in mind for your own patterning.
I cut these out of 10mm EVA foam, realized that that was super unnecessary for the crescents, it would be a thousand times easier to just mold them out of Worbla scraps, dremeled the big pieces down to be all smooth and rounded at the edge, and promptly realized that the 10mm foam was gonna be wayyyyyy too thick. It might have been manageable but adding Worbla wasn't exactly going to make them smaller. So I went out and got some 5mm foam and redid the cutting and dremeling. It looked much better. I encased everything in Worbla just like I had done with everything else, and immediately realized I had the same flatness issue I'd had with the lower part of the breastplate. So I solved it the same way, more Worbla snakes carefully pressed and sculpted into the piece.
You can see the difference it makes. However, this did end up making them much thicker, and it actually ended up nearly as thick as the 10mm foam. Were I to redo this part, I would carve and shape the 10mm foam way down more to get those ridges without adding more Worbla. That would solve the thickness problem because I'd have to carve so much more off to do that. The other issue my method caused was that the Worbla was so thick on those ridges that it made it very difficult to heat all the way through when I needed to attach these to the breastplate cups. All I needed to do was heat up the decorations and the cups and press them in place, but I had to spend a long time heating it to get everything to bend and mold around the cups. It all still looked good in the end, but the designs are still too thick to be truly accurate.
I made some small snakes of Worbla, almost Tootsie Roll shaped but a little thinner, that I pointed at either end and shaped in a ridge across the middle for the little crescents and just pressed them in place according to the screenshots I was working with. I feel like I could have made these smaller as well, but they matched the rest of the designs.
Incidentally, your patterns for the designs can tell you where to place the designs, just tape the patterns back to the breastplate cups and trace the outlines with a sharpie or something. It'll show you right where to stick the designs, and it's all going to be painted anyways, so it really doesn't matter if you draw on it.
Basically, overall I'm not upset about the final shape of my breastplate, but it really could have benefited from a lot more time with the dremel to get the foam base to the correct shape, rather than trying to correct it with more Worbla later. It also ended up a bit too large just in general, so I would size down just slightly on my pattern as well. I made it about 14" across, I'd probably go for more like 12". Just little nitpicky things, nothing earth shattering.
Now that the Worbla is done, it's time to prime it. Worbla naturally has a little bit of a sandy texture, and you're probably going to want to smooth that out. There are several different ways to do this and I tried several.
On the back piece, I simply painted it with a few coats of wood glue. This is a popular primer, and seemed to do just fine. I didn't feel like I needed a perfectly smooth texture, but I do wish I had done a few more coats at least.
This is an up close shot of the back after painting. You can still see some of the texture, but it's not really the end of the world.
For the breastplate, due to all the ridges I had added with snakes of Worbla, definitely had some weird edges and unevenness that needed to be filled in and smoothed. For this you need something with a lot of body so you can sand it and it will fill the holes. Basically what I used is a homemade Gesso. You can buy artist's Gesso from craft stores, but that stuff is expensive. I bought a tub of drywall joint compound from the hardware store and mixed it in 50/50 portions with basic Elmer's white glue. I've used this for multiple other projects, and it works wonderfully. You smear the goo all over, let it dry and sand it. You can repeat this as many times as necessary depending on how smooth you want your surface to be.
I did 2 or 3 coats on the breastplate, sanding with 120 grit sandpaper after every coat. (Got your safety glasses and dust mask, right? You do not want this dust in your lungs or eyes.) Based on screenshots I knew the breastplate isn't super smooth, so I didn't need a perfect finish, I just wanted to even out the weirdness around all the ridges. After the gesso coats I used an automotive sandable spray primer/filler and 300 grit sandpaper. Sanding all those curves and shapes wasn't terribly easy or fun, but it was necessary.
There's some up close shots of the breastplate after painting. Definitely still has some uneven roughness, but it's smoother than the back piece, and the added ridges don't look like separate pieces anymore.
Once priming was done, I painted everything black. I wanted a black base in case of paint chipping, I hoped the black would show and look like natural wear if I had an issue with that. Then I rubbed everything down with Antique Gold Rub N Buff
It took the whole rest of the tube to do these, but that includes the accessory armor pieces that were already done, which will be covered in the next post.
Obviously that flat gold was never going to fly. After considering my options, I actually decided to buy an airbrush to get the weathering and shadowing I wanted. I just used a basic black and went over all the creases and recessed areas. It was only my second or third time using the air brush, so I don't have any special techniques or tips for this. Go easy, you can always add more black, but removing it will be very difficult. If I can do it, you can do it.
To protect it I painted them with a coat of semi-gloss Polycrylic, but semi-gloss ended up looking an awful lot like regular gloss, so I sprayed them down with a few coats of a matte topcoat, which dulled the gloss beautifully.
A quick note on the paint- the upper armbands of this costume bumped up against the side pieces of the breastplate.
After only wearing it twice for a few hours, you can see that paint has been scraped off. So maybe put some extra clear coat on this part just to really protect that paint.
For the attachments, on the back I used some straps I had saved from an old purse I'd taken apart for the hardware, but you could just as easily make new ones out of scraps of pleather just like you did for the shoulder straps of the corset. For the sides I used the buckles and straps I had removed from my thrift store boots in the last post. All I had to do was measure how long I wanted those straps to be and sew them down over the D rings. Since they already had buckles attached, it was ridiculously easy. I've seen other tutorials use double D rings here to connect the straps, but I didn't need to do that, and honestly I think buckles are more secure. You can buy them at any craft store, that's the route I'd recommend.
The breastplate also has a line of pleather with some rivets across the top of the cups, this was super straightforward. I just cut thin strips of pleather that I evenly spaced a few studs in and then glued it down.
The squiggly wire bits on the front were pretty easy as well. I used copper wire from the hardware store and a round wire mandrel, but any round object of the size you want would work. you want each loop to be about the diameter of a nickel or so, but it doesn't have to be perfect. So use a fat marker or paint pen or wooden dowel or whatever you've got.
So, I looped the wire around, just sort of eyeballing it. I ended up with about 8 loops to get the length I wanted, and it took about a foot and a half of wire. I then painted it with Patina paint, specifically for metal, in Ancient Bronze, so it would match everything else. I also gave it a clear coat of spray varnish just to protect the paint.
And that should be it for the breastplate and the backplate! Obviously there's more armor pieces to go with this, but that comes in the next post.
Part Four: The Accessory Armor Pieces: The Shoulders, The Armbands, and the Kneeguards
On the back piece, I simply painted it with a few coats of wood glue. This is a popular primer, and seemed to do just fine. I didn't feel like I needed a perfectly smooth texture, but I do wish I had done a few more coats at least.
This is an up close shot of the back after painting. You can still see some of the texture, but it's not really the end of the world.
For the breastplate, due to all the ridges I had added with snakes of Worbla, definitely had some weird edges and unevenness that needed to be filled in and smoothed. For this you need something with a lot of body so you can sand it and it will fill the holes. Basically what I used is a homemade Gesso. You can buy artist's Gesso from craft stores, but that stuff is expensive. I bought a tub of drywall joint compound from the hardware store and mixed it in 50/50 portions with basic Elmer's white glue. I've used this for multiple other projects, and it works wonderfully. You smear the goo all over, let it dry and sand it. You can repeat this as many times as necessary depending on how smooth you want your surface to be.
I did 2 or 3 coats on the breastplate, sanding with 120 grit sandpaper after every coat. (Got your safety glasses and dust mask, right? You do not want this dust in your lungs or eyes.) Based on screenshots I knew the breastplate isn't super smooth, so I didn't need a perfect finish, I just wanted to even out the weirdness around all the ridges. After the gesso coats I used an automotive sandable spray primer/filler and 300 grit sandpaper. Sanding all those curves and shapes wasn't terribly easy or fun, but it was necessary.
There's some up close shots of the breastplate after painting. Definitely still has some uneven roughness, but it's smoother than the back piece, and the added ridges don't look like separate pieces anymore.
Once priming was done, I painted everything black. I wanted a black base in case of paint chipping, I hoped the black would show and look like natural wear if I had an issue with that. Then I rubbed everything down with Antique Gold Rub N Buff
It took the whole rest of the tube to do these, but that includes the accessory armor pieces that were already done, which will be covered in the next post.
Obviously that flat gold was never going to fly. After considering my options, I actually decided to buy an airbrush to get the weathering and shadowing I wanted. I just used a basic black and went over all the creases and recessed areas. It was only my second or third time using the air brush, so I don't have any special techniques or tips for this. Go easy, you can always add more black, but removing it will be very difficult. If I can do it, you can do it.
To protect it I painted them with a coat of semi-gloss Polycrylic, but semi-gloss ended up looking an awful lot like regular gloss, so I sprayed them down with a few coats of a matte topcoat, which dulled the gloss beautifully.
A quick note on the paint- the upper armbands of this costume bumped up against the side pieces of the breastplate.
After only wearing it twice for a few hours, you can see that paint has been scraped off. So maybe put some extra clear coat on this part just to really protect that paint.
For the attachments, on the back I used some straps I had saved from an old purse I'd taken apart for the hardware, but you could just as easily make new ones out of scraps of pleather just like you did for the shoulder straps of the corset. For the sides I used the buckles and straps I had removed from my thrift store boots in the last post. All I had to do was measure how long I wanted those straps to be and sew them down over the D rings. Since they already had buckles attached, it was ridiculously easy. I've seen other tutorials use double D rings here to connect the straps, but I didn't need to do that, and honestly I think buckles are more secure. You can buy them at any craft store, that's the route I'd recommend.
The breastplate also has a line of pleather with some rivets across the top of the cups, this was super straightforward. I just cut thin strips of pleather that I evenly spaced a few studs in and then glued it down.
The squiggly wire bits on the front were pretty easy as well. I used copper wire from the hardware store and a round wire mandrel, but any round object of the size you want would work. you want each loop to be about the diameter of a nickel or so, but it doesn't have to be perfect. So use a fat marker or paint pen or wooden dowel or whatever you've got.
So, I looped the wire around, just sort of eyeballing it. I ended up with about 8 loops to get the length I wanted, and it took about a foot and a half of wire. I then painted it with Patina paint, specifically for metal, in Ancient Bronze, so it would match everything else. I also gave it a clear coat of spray varnish just to protect the paint.
And that should be it for the breastplate and the backplate! Obviously there's more armor pieces to go with this, but that comes in the next post.
Part Four: The Accessory Armor Pieces: The Shoulders, The Armbands, and the Kneeguards
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