QT3 hobby desk thread

That looks pretty sweet, Juan.

Are you going to give it some battle damage during your weathering process?

I don’t think so. Maybe a couple of scratches, but that’s all. Battle damage is best done pre-painting, I think.

Stretching the idea of “hobby” here, but I’ve decided to get back into life drawing after a 20 year hiatus. Here’s my 3rd go at it.

Kinda rough, but I’m enjoying it. :)

Great work. I haven’t tried this yet, but need to.

Man, that’s good, specially after such a long time. I think my drawings muscles will be much more stunted than that, and its’ been only 5-6 years!

In other news, the Gladiator is ready for camouflage (I’m thinking a darker blue), decals and after that, finally weathering…

The head is my first ever figure painting. A little messy (should have stopped earlier, looked better and cleaner two steps before), but from far away enough it looks good, I think…

I think the head looks great! Skin is pretty tough to paint in general.

Weathering looks superb as per usual. :)

I might take it down a notch when applying the camo. Originally I was going to hand paint it, but now I think it will need chipping, and if so a second chipping layer will hide some of the chipping already there. We’ll see, it’s going to be some days till I can get back to it.

Camo (chipped) and decals (also chipped) down.

Left is some minor detail painting and a lot of washes to give it depth and wear. This is still my favorite model so far!

Awesome work!

That looks super sweet! Nice work!

Thanks guys. I like summer, I get more free time!!!

I put down some filters and basic washes to bring some depth to the model. It¡s subtle and does not show a lot in camera, but it’s good enough that I’m ready for the penultimate step (oil, grim and rust streaks). After that it’s a couple of hours of applying pigments and I’ll finally be done.

WIP pics:

Ok, so I think I might be finished with the Gladiator/Tick.

I mean, I could keep going forever, but probably I shouldn’t. I could make the interiors match the weathered exterior more, for sure.

Anyway, it was really fun to see in this build how the painting process kept adding to the previous steps towards the final goal. If you see the images I posted before you can see sort of the slow buildup of base color chipping -> camo chipping -> filters -> washes and pigments (the final images)…

http://imgur.com/a/Uie7y

Looks great, Juan.

I keep meaning to return to my hobby table and I keep getting distra… look, a bunny!

Over the last month or so, my wife and I sort of went down a rabbit-hole of costuming and cosplay stuff.

A small amount of background: my old go-to Halloween costume is a full-body cow costume, made from Dalmatian-spotted fur-fabric and sporting a hood with horns and plushy udders. Being me, I rigged the udders to a bladder and a small spigot from which I could dispense Bailey’s Irish Cream to whoever was crazy enough to let me freshen their coffee from my crotch.

It’s a great costume, but I’ve worn it every couple years for the last fifteen years or so and I’m frankly kind of tired of it. Likewise, my wife’s “sexy barmaid” costume is wearing a little thin.

So we decided to upgrade this year. But what?

Well, my first thought was to make a “Pickle Rick” costume. If you’re unfamiliar with this idea, then you need to stop reading this and immediately binge-watch all available seasons of “Rick and Morty” right now.

I was somewhat surprised that at least one guy had already done this costume, despite the episode only having aired a few months back (as of this writing). He has a set of videos that sort of detail how he did it, and he links to the guy that HE learned his techniques from, and that guy has an excellent set of basic tutorials on using foam rubber to create movie-props and costumes. It is that guy, Evil Ted, that really led us down the path of madness.

It became clear fairly early on that the Pickle Rick costume wasn’t going to work for me. At 6’6” and being… let’s says “robust” in the hips… either I would end up looking like a green potato or else the costume would be scraping the ceiling of a typical home.

However, we were very inspired by the Evil Ted tutorials on fantasy armor and decided to go down that road. We didn’t really have a particular target in mind, like a set of characters or even a theme from a movie or game… we just sort of wanted to do vaguely Germanic “barbarian” armor. That kind of came back to bite us when people at the party wanted to know “who are you supposed to be”, but that’s not really the point of this post.

This starts to get really long, so I’ll enclose the rest in collapsible sections.

Making torso forms and patterns

The first thing we needed was to create patterns for the armor. Since my wife is so tall and since I am likewise so tall (and wide), standard patterns created for mere humans were not going to cut the mustard. Instead we had to figure out a way to create patterns for our own builds.

This is a problem that the cosplay community has long ago solved, and there are two related solutions: creating a one-off pattern and creating a more permanent body-mold. We elected to do the latter, but they both had the same basic steps.

First, you cover the subject’s body in something that can be ripped up. For a permanent mold that’s typically an old T-shirt, and for a temporary pattern it’s either cellophane or tinfoil. In our case, we found some old shirts, then wrapped the exposed skin in plastic-wrap.

Next, you cover the subject in duct-tape. Long strips for the vast, featureless tracts of body like my unfortunate beer-belly, and smaller strips for curved areas like… oh, let’s go with “my shoulders”. If you’re making a permanent body-form, you use a couple layers of tape. A temp form can be made with just one layer of tape or even masking tape.

For the permanent forms, we cut each other out of everything by cutting a line up the subject’s back and then sliding them out of the duct-tape suit. You then tape that cut back up so you’re left with a semi-rigid shirt of duct-tape. Then you insert a cheap plastic clothes-hanger into the void and stuff it with either paper or (preferably) puffy batting until the whole thing is filled. You tape up the arms and neck and then cut out a base from foam (we used some two-inch housing insulation foam that we had lying around) and seal it all up.

In the end you have a torso that should be a good approximation of your own body that can be used to size some armor. Pro-tip: do not leave such a torso on the kitchen table overnight, especially if you have to come down in the dark to feed the dog. Creepy!

Once you have your body-form, you make armor patterns using it as a substitute for your own body. You wrap the form in cellophane or tinfoil and use yet more tape over this covering. Once the tape is on, you draw on the tape in the shape of the armor that you want to create.

You then carefully peel away the tape-and-foil covering off the torso-form (or off your wife if this is a one-shot deal), press it as flat as you can, and cut out the shape. If this is a curved piece (like a shoulder or breast), then you’ll probably have to cut one or more slits in the tape to allow it to flatten out.

Then you trace around the shape onto some durable paper – manila folders or butcher paper – and then cut the shape out. This becomes your master pattern for tracing on whatever, and you’ll probably use it several times to create trim or decoration patterns.

Step-by-step examples

Now, up until this point it’s been a bunch of fun copping righteous feels while covering my wife with sticky latex tape, but now comes the truly great part, because it involves power tools:

You put the patterns onto a sheet of foam-rubber flooring mat. This is the type that has the jigsaw-puzzle edges that you might use in a workroom or romper-room. Then, depending on the thickness of the foam, you use either a razor or a bandsaw to cut the shapes out.

With a heat-gun and a lot of pulling and bending, you can form the foam into gentle curves that can be contoured to your body, to include hemispheres or even spheres if you plan correctly. After that, it’s just a matter of painting and assembly. Because I was smart enough to take some pictures, I’ll walk you through some bracers, already in progress:

Above is the basic bracer forms, built out of 15mm (5/8 inch) foam, then bent into a curved shape and the end-fork flared out a bit. Here I did add some trim out of quarter-inch (7mm) foam on the edges. The foam mats come with one side patterned and sealed, and you typically use the un-sealed size on the visible side as shown here. The gray is the basic color.

Next is the addition of some trim pieces made from craft foam that you’d pick up at any crafts store; I think it might be either 1 or 2mm. It’s easy to work with – you can either cut out the shapes with a scissors or a craft-blade. At this point in the process we were starting to run up against the wall, time-wise, so rather than running to the store to get a full new sheet of foam, I constructed the right bracer’s internal trim with three scrap pieces. This left a small seam that I really should have filled with caulk, but I didn’t have the day necessary to let it cure and sand it down.

Pretty much all the construction is done with contact cement – the same stuff that they use to attach the soles of shoes to the leather. You smear some on both pieces, let them cure for a half-hour or so, and then stick the two pieces together and press down hard. The bond that it makes is stronger than the foam itself.

Next up is to prime and seal the foam. Because the foam is so porous, you have to seal it with either a latex paint or a rubber spay. The above is after the first coat of a rubber paint called “Plasti-Dip”. It goes on pretty thick, but cures a bit thinner after a day or so.

From here on out, it’s pretty simple arts-and-crafts. The spray here is just some acrylic paint that we got at the craft store. The pros recommend an automotive enamel for metallics, but the selection around here was not that great, and the acrylic works fine. This is “rose gold” and it looks very light when it’s first sprayed on (as shown here), but it starts to darken to a more coppery shade later on.

Airbrushing. I started to do a black wash and then highlighting or dry-brushing, but the process dulled the armor too much. The airbrush took forever, but the effect was much more dramatic, especially on my wife’s costume. This was my first time using an artist’s airbrush, and I really enjoyed it.

Some highlighting. It’s just some silver lines rubbed or drybrushed on the edges. Nothing special, but it makes the trim “pop” a little more.

Finally, we added some leather scraps and grommets for the connectors and some felt on the inside for comfort. We went with leather laces to keep to the “fantasy” theme, and that was a mistake. We should have used shoelaces or even gone with D-rings and fabric straps: the leather didn’t slide through the grommets too well and was difficult to lace up and tighten.

The good, bad and ugly results

Here’s me and the ridiculously-photogenic Ms. Wisdom in our barbaric glory.

In retrospect, I wish I had constructed some type of basic kilt rather than trying for the faux-fur loincloth and pleather strips. It made the whole scheme look a bit less “bulky”. I did get to make a bunch of cracks about “what Crom gifted me with” lines when people asked what was under there, but… it was drafty.

I also wish I had done something better with my head than just a leather strap. I’m always wary of wearing headgear because I pretty much scrape most door-fames as it is, but Ms. Wisdom’s cheek-guards really pulled her costume together, and I was missing something similar.

My wife fared much better with the skirt and thigh-socks. It was less “barbarian princess” and more “Valkyrie”.

Anyway. It was a great project to work on with my wife, and it was great practice for next time. We are continuing to watch the various YouTube videos on the subject and we’re starting to research some more extensive processes like making foam molds and using the thermoplastic sheets that some of the more advanced cosplay folks employ. Next year we’ll start several months in advance and produce something much more fancy. I’m thinking Blood Angels Chaplain or Inquisitor Lord.

Also check out Tested on YT, if you don’t already. They also regularly post prop/armour/foam/moulding builds of all sorts of stuff.

Great result, btw.

I gotta say that was the exact thing that came to my mind. Awesome job.

How long in total did it take to work that up? Also for something you more or less made up, that’s pretty creative design.

It took the two of us three solid weeks to create both costumes, working a couple hours each weekday night and maybe five hours each weekend day. Call it about 40 man-hours per costume.

The “trim” design for the armor is all ours (really, Ms. Wisdom’s) creativity-wise, but the basic shapes and layout (hip plates, greaves, etc.) we got from Kamui Cosplay, who has some cheap PDFs with patterns you can download. The all-important headband/cheek-plate thing my wife is wearing was pretty-much copied from her Wonder Woman costume.

Following on from the Halloween costume thing from above, my wife and I decided that we had so much fun creating those (in a rushed, “do we have time for X?” manner) that we figured to up our game a bit for next year and work on some stuff over the course of this next year.

Me being me, I made a checklist of features I wanted, and a few of those items were: a voice modulator, lighting effects, and sound.

Reading some blogs and watching YouTube videos, most of those things you can rip out of cheap toys and/or create with some very basic circuits. But I have chosen to be stupidly ambitious and do bizarre fade in/out lighting effects, a modifiable voice modulator, etc. Pretty much because I’m a techie masochist.

Anyway, what you need for most of this stuff is a programmable microprocessor kit, and there are a bunch of them available. One of the more popular ones is an open-source standard that is typically referred to by the name of the company that spawned it: Arduino.

For a couple dozen bucks you can get a prototyping/starter kit with their basic board; a mess of sensors (humidity sensors, high frequency distance detectors,etc.); a few controls (buttons, potentiometers, etc.); and a few output devices (tiny LCDs, speakers, etc.). Then you go through the examples and write some super-simplistic C code that you upload to the board.

It’s was a lot of fun creating a device that outputs the distance found by the sensor onto the tiny LCD screen, or one that lights up an LED based on how dark it is in the room. But after going though the tutorials I figured I had a good grasp on the basics and it was time to get going on one of my to-do projects.

The voice modulator sounded fun, and as part of an Xmas present to me, my wife had ordered the tiny sound board that a tutorial online had suggested. It arrived in the standard anti-static plastic, and I had not opened it until yesterday. It was supposed to look like this:

But it… uh… didn’t look like that at all. In fact, it looked a lot like the picture below. Except not quite so organized.

I did take some electrical engineering courses in college as part of my degree, but it was all theory and diagrams; at no point did we ever solder anything to a circuit board. In the thirty years or so since college I’ve soldered a LOT of stuff… usually copper pipes using a blowtorch. So this was kinda outside my comfort zone. Like a LOT outside. Maybe three or four zones over.

But hell, I’m game. I spent a pretty enjoyable four hours last night following the (thankfully super-detailed) instructions online, and at the end of it I had a device that looked surprisingly similar to the top picture.

This morning I hooked it up to the main Arduino board, uploaded some simple test-code and… hey it works! I can play a ridiculously poor-quality WAV file in mono sound!

Yay! Onwards towards a voice-modulator!

Awesome! Nothing like rolling up your sleeves and digging in!