There have been several ways that people have solved the problem of the heels on these boots. I decided to go the same route as my wife and build them on existing high heeled shoes with clear plastic heels. I nabbed these 4″ stripper heels from Amazon in the appropriate size for the client.

The outer shell of the boots were created from heat formed EVA foam floor mats. For the most part, these were templated on the fly in a very “trial and error” method. What you see in the final product is not the first try, not by a long shot. After taking measurements from the stripper heels, I laid out a flat paper template and cut it out of the foam then formed it by hand with a heat gun.

The real trick was figuring out a way to build the covering in pieces, then design a way to cover all of the seams. When I had the toe pieces formed, I attached them to the shoes with contact cement.

The back parts of the boots were done in the same manner, but made from two pieces so that I could form a complex curve along the back side of the leg. Again, these pieces were heat formed by hand until the fit nice and snugly around the shoe. I designed the connecting elements of the template to be a little big so that I could trim them to size once I had the forms figured out.

The back pieces were also attached to the stripper heels with contact cement. The plastic ankle strap inside of the shoe was eventually removed entirely after a test fitting on a friend with appropriately sized feet (my size 12 boats wouldn’t even come close to fitting into these things).

These jerks were no help at all.

I sanded down the seam between the front and back pieces with a drum sanding bit in my drill press. The plan was to cover this seam with white EVA foam later on.

With the shape all figured out, I covered the gray foam with a 2mm thin EVA craft foam. This was done with contact cement and took several tries. This kind of covering is prone to wrinkles. Lots of swearing happened.

Also, not pictured is the flat piece at the top/back of the boot where the spring piece would be attached. It’s a rectangular piece of 1/4″ PVC with three holes drilled into it. It was cemented to the back of the boot before the white covering was applied.

Again, I can’t reiterate enough how much of this build was a frustrating trial and error process. Here you can see some of the wrinkles. I ended up ripping off and sanding most of the white foam off for a 2nd try.

Eventually I was able to get a satisfactory covering on the boots. The black heel parts were done in 2mm black EVA craft foam and the white parts were overlapped over them.

The toe coverings were done the same way, just with a couple of layers of the white to get the seams the way they needed to look in the reference. I generally tried to template the pieces too big, cement them down, then trim the extra that flopped over the sides.

The toe tip was painted black with some enamel paint and the lines were drawn in with a fine tipped marker then painted over with enamels.

The heel springs were actually quite straight forward. Since the client would be standing on her shoe heels, the springs didn’t need to do anything other than look good. I built them from thin strips of aluminum. It was easy enough to bend to shape by hand. I reinforced the bottom part with another layer of aluminum and some J.B. Weld.

The stripper heels came with a plastic cap over an attachment rivet thing. I was able to pry the plastic cap off and repurpose the rivet through a hold drilled in the heel springs.

The tops of the springs got three holes drilled into them to match the attachment points on the back of the boots. After a quick black spray paint on the springs, they got glued into the boots with some hex bolts.

The very last thing the boots needed was a way to keep them attached to the client’s legs. I added a couple of nylon webbing/velcro straps to each boot along with a D-ring so that they could be tightened to size.

Done and done!

I printed up the designs full scale and got started! My plan for this was pretty similar to the way that Harrison built it. I planned out several layers of PVC sheet and styrene in different thicknesses.

Most of the pieces were cut out with an X-Acto knife. Some of the thicker parts were cut out with my scroll saw. The layers were all epoxied together.

The beveled edges on the side of the dagger were filled in with Bondo. I also added more styrene to the blade tips to reinforce them.

Once it was all filled in and sanded down, I got it all primed up and did some more sanding.

At this point, it was all ready for molding! Originally I thought I would need to cast it with some steel wire inside of the plastic for strength. This actually made the blades bow quite a bit, so I tried casting one without the wire. The non wire blade casting was incredibly durable and didn’t bow at all!

The finished blades were cast from SmoothCast 300 with a little bit of SoStrong black tint.

With the pieces all cast, they needed just a little bit of sanding and some paint! The base color was a rattle can metallic paint. Then I masked off the edges of the blade to paint the rest of it black.

After some clear coating, I did some light touch up weathering with a dry brushed black paint and some silver leaf Rub ‘N Buff.

That’s it! All done! Nothing to see down here!

I knew that I would need to make more than one copy of this gun, so I planned on building it in a series of parts that would be molded. Since I was on a tight deadline, photo coverage was a bit spotty, so I’ll do my best to paint you some pretty word pictures.

Of course I drew up some really detailed blueprints. Like always, I printed it out full scale to use as templates. In fact, the blueprints are for sale on my store here!

I started with one of the most complicated pieces; the scope. I cut out the side and top profile shapes out of 1/4″ MDF and glued them together. The empty space between them was filled in with rigid insulation foam. This cheap, lightweight material is great for taking up space inside the body of a prop piece.

Then I covered most of it in Apoxie Sculpt. This stuff is amazing. I sculpted it down to a close approximation of the scope shape and was able to sand and refine it after it cured.

The detail pieces on the scope were cut and shaped from PVC foam, styrene, and MDF.

I lathed the front element of the scope from a chunk of extra polyurethane plastic. The hood cover was cut from thin styrene and glued into place. Everything was sanded and smoothed down into the final shape.

The barrel was actually one of the more straight forward parts on this project. Of course I did most of it on my lathe, but it was way longer than my lathe, so I did it in two pieces. The lathe blanks were cast from polyurethane resin in cups and tubes that were roughly the right size and shape as the final parts. I also sunk PVC tubes into them to save on space.

Both barrel pieces got turned on the lathe and everything got primed/sanded a bunch. The plastic resin ended up with a bunch of tiny bubbles that were a pain to fill in, so it took a couple of tries.

The two barrel pieces were attached into one large piece. The vent holes required a bit of engineering to get right. I ended up modifying a cheap spade bit to perfectly drill the holes and the recessed bits around the outside of them with my drill press.

The more oblong vent hole things were a different story. I ended up making templates out of some thin aluminum sheet, taping them down to the surface of the barrel, and cutting them with a router bit on my Dremel.

The receiver of the gun was where I spent most of my build time. This part, by itself, is bigger than any other gun project that I’ve built. It started it’s life as a couple of sheets of 3/4″ particle board. In hind sight it would have been way better to use MDF, but I didn’t have any on hand at the time and I needed to get started toot-sweet. The two cut out shapes were glued together.

The magazine was made in the same fashion. I started adding slices of detail that were cut out of PCV foam and styrene. It was at this point that I realized that I could get MDF in an 1/8″ thickness and should have been using that instead of the vastly more expensive 1/8″ PVC.

The magazine got some more refinement and beveling. I also added a hex shaped screw. Everything in the future is hexagon shaped, by the way. I also cut out some thicker, sloped pieces out of MDF for the front end of the receiver. If you squint, you can also see where I cut out a hole and added a tube to receive the barrel where it attaches to the main body of the gun.

The front end of the receiver was quite a challenge. I ended up using a combination of Bondo and Apoxie Sculpt to get the shapes just right. The side stripes were cut from styrene.

The weird rib things across the grip were also shaped from Apoxie Sculpt, right over the parts that I had shaped earlier.

I also got a head start on the butt stock. The main form was cut from 3/4″ MDF (yes I went and bought some, screw particle board). The tiny piston thingie was lathed from a dowel and I carved in some detail slots with my Dremel.

All of the detail pieces for the butt stock were cut from 1/4″ MDF, 1/8″ MDF and 1/16″ styrene. This is the “slicing” technique that I use for just about all of my gun builds.

To create a matching surface where the stock and receiver meet, I employed a technique known as the “Bondo Squish”. I put tape on one side and smeared Bondo on the other and then squished them together, holding them in place. When the Bondo was mostly set, I pulled the pieces apart and let the Bondo cure. The extra Bondo was trimmed away and sanded smooth. This way these two separate pieces would have a tight fit when attached for the final build.

The stock was finished, primed and sanded. The large, flat head screws were shaped out of a piece of dowel and cast using a clay push mold. The things that look like Philip’s head screws are actually Philip’s head screws. Here you can see that it resembles some kind of space chicken. It is my new shop mascot.

The receiver also got lots of sanding and priming. I also finished up the detail parts like the trigger, trigger guard, and barrel hood. Most of that was done with layers of MDF and styrene in different thicknesses, just like everything else.

I could have just painted the gun up at this point and called it a day, but I knew that I needed more than one copy of this gun, so I set about making some molds. This was by far the most time consuming, tedious, expensive, and emotional part of the build process.

I started with the barrel. For this one I tried something new. To save on silicone costs and time, I made it a one part mold. I used a wide PVC pipe as my mold jacket, centered the barrel in it, and poured in the liquid silicone from the top. Also, in the master of the barrel, I included a nub inside the barrel that would later be used to hold a threaded rod in the casting.

The PVC tube had been split on both sides, prior to pouring the silicone, with hinges on one side so that the mold jacket was kind of a clam shell. When the silicone cured, I cracked it open and cut a wavy seam in the side of the mold that was 90 degrees off from the slit in the mold jacket. I was able to retrieve the barrel master at this point and start casting barrels!

Again, I added a threaded steel rod into the casting before pouring my resin. This would ensure that the barrel was nice and strong as well as having a great way to attach it to the main gun body. I also added some insulation foam (not pictured) to the rod to take up some space inside the casting.

The scope mold was not so rousing of a success. My first attempt ended in a catastrophic clay blowout, resulting in a failed mold and a lot of wasted silicone. There were a number of factors that led to this failure. First, the walls of the mold box were way too thin. I used 1/8″ MDF and I needed at least 1/4″. Second, I didn’t put in enough clay to keep it stuck to the sloped underside of the scope master. Last, I poured in three batches of uncured silicone into the box all at once, filling the box. This added a lot of liquid weight to the clay. For the second attempt I let the first batch of silicone cure a little bit before adding the remaining goo.

The rest of the molds were pretty straight forward. They were all two part box molds. I did a LOT of claying. The receiver piece was especially time consuming. It was easily the largest mold I’ve ever made.

It took me 4 straight days of work to make the molds. It was a very trying time for me, but I made it through to the other side relatively unscathed! Casting the parts was actually pretty straight forward and extremely satisfying.

I painted the entire gun with Model Master’s buffable metalizer laquer airbrush paint. I went with a two-toned approach to add some contrast. The colors are Stainless Steel (lighter) and Gunmetal (darker). The basic process was basically: airbrush, dry, buff, seal, mask, airbrush, dry, buff, and seal.

For the tube thing on the stock, I bent a piece of 1/4″ aluminum rod and placed it into the eye holes of the space chicken.

Finally I did a lot of weathering on the gun. I wanted it to look like it’s been fighting Zerg for the last decade. I used acrylic black and yellow ochre paints to get a dirty, dusty look.

Then I added a couple of coats of matte clear spray paint and this bad boy was done! *gasp* This is, to date, my most challenging project; both technically and emotionally. Thank you for coming on this journey with me!

The most challenging part of this costume was the mask. I’ve never made a face hugging prosthetic like this before, so I had to do some learning to figure it out. I started by making a casting of my own head with plaster bandages (I had helpers).

From that I was able to cast a plastic copy of my face. It was pretty rough, since the plaster isn’t really detailed, but I was able to sand it down nicely and use it as a base for sculpting my Robin domino mask.

The mask was sculpted using a non-drying, non-sulfuric modeling clay. This was very similar to my Handsome Jack mask sculpt. I took my time with this, trying really hard to get it nice and smooth, as well as symmetrical. To smooth it, I rubbed it with isopropyl alcohol a whole bunch.

Next I had to mold this thing. I used Smooth-On’s Rebound 25. It was done in several steps to get a good skin of rubber on it and then add registration keys later. Then the front got a Plasti-Paste jacket mold.

Next I pulled the front mold off of the plastic face form. As luck would have it, the clay came right off the form and stayed in the mold. This was huge. Because of this, I had very little issue molding the back of the mask!

Casting the mask was pretty tricky. I used a urethane rubber resin and it is rather viscous while in it’s liquid state. I did some test casts that didn’t go so great, but I ended up with a bit of a jury rigged injection molding process. I drilled two holes into the back of the mask; one to pour resin in and one as an air vent. Then I put a bunch of eye droppers into the liquid resin to suck up the material. One at a time, I inserted the eye droppers into the pouring hole and injected the resin into the mold. I repeated this until resin came out of the air vent. This way I was very sure that there were no air bubbles in the mold!

The belt was another complicated piece. I wanted to duplicate the game model, but I wasn’t concerned with the pouches being functional. I decided to model and cast the buckle and pouches from plastic. They were shaped from pieces of PCV foam plastic and cast in silicone for molding!

The finished pieces were cast from polyurethane plastic resin. I used a yellow tint in the resin so that the pieces wouldn’t need to be painted. The result was pretty damn close to the source material.

After casting and weathering the belt pieces, I attached them all to a 2″ wide strip of nylon webbing. The plastic pieces were attached via screws. Also attached to the webbing was a buckle clip for easy adjustment and removal.

For the shirt, I tried to make my own shirt from scratch. It was a total disaster and all photo evidence of it has been destroyed. I ended up going with a plain red, athletic compression shirt. I stretched the shirt over a plaster casting that I have of my torso and painting it to resemble the in-game character’s shirt/armor.

For the painting, I drew in guide lines freehand with a fabric marker.

Once everything was laid out, I used my airbrush to paint in the rest of the details. This actually went pretty quickly and I was very pleased with the results. The highlights were done with a gold paint pen. Some of the “damaged” bits were brushed on fabric paint. I also used that technique to cover the Nike Shwoosh on the upper chest.

The “R” on the chest was done much like the belt pieces. It was cut from PVC foam sheets, molded and then cold cast with brass powder so that I could give it a nice, shiny polish.

Shiny!

The forearm and boot armor bits were all made from EVA foam floor mats. The technique here was identical to my N7 Defender armor build. The foam parts were heated with a heat gun and formed over a large PVC pipe.

For the boots, I made foam coverings for a pair of boots that I already owned. The gloves were shop gloves from Harbor Freight that I cut the finger tips off of. With everything assembled, everything got some touch up weathering paint.

The weapon is hand down the easiest prop I’ve ever made. It’s a stick. I built it from two pieces of dowel and a PVC pipe. Then I painted lines on it. Done.

The last thing I made was the hood and cape. It’s all one piece, sewn from one piece of black and one piece of yellow cloth. It took me a lot of trial, error, and swearing to get it to fit properly, but it eventually came together. It attaches at the throat with a snap.

That’s it! All done! I wore this get-up to Emerald City Comic Con a couple of weeks ago and it was a hit! I high-fived at least 30 other Robins. Win!

This build was a pretty big departure from my traditional space pistols and daggers, so I did a LOT of planning! I knew that it needed to be durable for convention usage as well as fairly light weight. I spent a day or two drawing up some extremely detailed blueprints.

The dome shape of the mace was built out of 8″ acrylic light globes from Home Depot. I got two of them incase I broke one and I needed some spare material to account for the light fixture lip on the bottom of the dome.

The spikes were molded and I lathed the master from plastic resin that was originally cast out of a funnel to save on materials and lathing time. I needed 13 of them for the whole mace. One of the trickier parts of build was figuring out the spacing on the dome for all of those spikes. Also tricky: not bashing a hole through the acrylic sphere while drilling holes for the spikes.

I started the shield shape by making a cross section from MDF wood and filling in the quadrants with rigid insulation foam. The shape was then cut with a coping saw, carved with a rasp, and sanded.

Then I coated the shield shape in several coats of polyurethane plastic resin. These layers of plastic got sanded, shaped, and filled with Bondo until I had a form that I was happy with.

After the shield dome shape was good, I cut out the outer lip of the shield, also from insulation foam. This was glued to the inner dome and also skinned in resin, sanded, and filled.

The cross pieces of the shield were cut from varying thicknesses of foam PVC. The center circle piece was 1/4″ thick and glued down to the center. The cross strips were 1/8″ thick and were heat formed to the contour of the shield. These were also glued down. At this point I was feeling particularly badass.

Since this shield needed to be lightweight and durable, I decided to vacuform it from high impact styrene. That meant that I needed a new vacuform table!

The shield handle was made from some PVC pipe and pipe fixtures. The yellow bit on the pommel end is more polyurethane plastic resin that I cast on the end of the tube and spun around the lathe. All of the back side of the shield was attached to a circle of 1/4″ MDF wood. The planks on the back were also 1/4″ MDF that I carved some grain lines in with my Dremel. I put T-nuts in the back piece for attaching the strap and handle later.

With the mold made for the mace spikes, I slush cast them from plastic resin, adding a bold with the last layer. This way the spikes could be bolted into the dome head.

All 13 of the spikes were bolted into the dome. (Not pictured: The interior of the dome was reinforced with fiberglass and then after the nuts were tightened I slush cast plastic resin to reinforce the shape more as well as keep the nuts from spinning off.) (Pictured: Total Badass)

Suddenly I realized that the deadline was looming, so I didn’t take very many photos, but I will do my best to paint you a word picture.

• The shaft is a 1-1/8″ wooden dowel. The hexagon shape was achieved with a belt sander.
• The small collar on the top of the shaft was two pieces of 1/4″ MDF with 4 faceted pieces of styrene.
• The tapered cone thing near the top of the shaft is polyurethane plastic resin that was cast around a PVC tube and turned on the lathe.
• All of this stuff was glued to the dome.

The pommel of the spike was also a lathed piece of plastic resin that was bolted into the bottom of the shaft. All of the rivet pieces on both the mace and shield were furniture tacks. The screw pieces on the shield were cast plastic from a simple clay push mold. The deadline was looming at this point! GET IT PRIMED!

Most of the metal looking parts on the mace were painted with an airbrush “metalizer” lacquer. After spraying it, I buffed it with a cloth and it looks wicked awesome.

After that, everything got painted. I also didn’t take any photos here, but most of it was masking, rattle cans, clear coats, and then weathering!

The back of the shield got a repurposed leather belt as a strap and voila! It is done!

Total. Badass.

I took my references straight from the in-game model and a 2D mask image that Gearbox provided as a cut-out, flat mask. As is my traditional style, I took several orthographic views and drew up nice, concise vectors.

I had ideas for making more than one copy of this guy, so I planned accordingly. The aim was to create a master that I could make a mold from. I sculpted the face out of modeling clay on top of a foam mannequin head.

The modeling clay works best when it’s nice and warm, so I kept it in a box with a desk lamp pointed at it. Then I took large hunks of it and slapped it onto the foam head to get the general shape of the mask.

I had to dig deep into my high school art class memories to get a feel for modeling with clay again. This was definitely a test of my patience. Also, I didn’t have any clay modeling tools, so I made some.

I crafted the hardware bits of the mask out of plastic and dowels. This was way easier than trying to get these hard geometric shapes out of clay. Once these pieces were finished, they were embedded straight into the clay face.

With the sculpting finished, it was time for this guy to go under some silicone. I used Smooth-On’s Rebound 25. He got 3-4 layers of silicone. Half way through I added some registration keys for the mold jacket.

2 layers of Plasti-Paste made up the mold jacket.

Once all of this was cured, I pulled it all off the master. The clay came off with the silicone, destroying the master. Let’s hope the mold works, or a week of sculpting will have just gone right out the window!

VIOLA!

The copies were slush cast with polyurethane plastic resin. Pictured here is Tap Plastic’s Quik Cast, but I ended up using Smooth-On’s Smooth-Cast 300. For a comprehensive tutorial on slush casting, check out Volpin Props’ video here.

Out of the mold, the mask looks pretty decent, but needs a lot of sanding. I had a lot of trouble getting the master to be perfectly smooth since you can’t sand clay.

Post sanding, this handsome fellow was ready for a little paint. The base coat was some light, flesh colored enamels that I applied with my airbrush. I also went over the face again with a slightly darker skin tone to give it a little depth. The hair and metal bits were also enamels that I just brushed on. I outlined his face, as per the game art style, with permanent marker.

Finally, the client asked that I add removable eyes for display purposes. So here is our cheeky hero, complete with peepers!

In order to get good reference images of Keening, I decided the best thing to do was to play Skyrim and acquire the in-game item. 10 hours of gameplay later (I got a little sidetracked) and voila! I had the dagger! I grabbed some snapshots of the screen and drew up my own schematics.

I started out by turning the handle on my lathe out of a cylinder of polyurethane resin that was cast in a toilet paper tube. The side spike things were also lathed from plastic.

The bottom wing-a-ling pieces of the pommel were shaped out with PVC and styrene, then filled in and sculpted with Apoxie Sculpt. The rectangular holes at the top of the handle were cut from a strip of styrene, which was heated and bent around the handle.

The hilt pieces and the crystal were both made from 3/8″ thick foam PVC sheet. The “skeleton” shape pieces were cut from thin styrene and glued to the PVC.

The empty spaces of the skeletons were filled in with Bondo and shaped on a belt sander/Dremel. Also the circular piece on the hilt was lathed from plastic and copied in a clay push mold. The metal detail pieces on the hilt are the heads of rivets that were cut down and glued in place.

The sides of the hilt were done similarly, but from just the thin styrene.

More detail bits were added to the side pieces with styrene. I also drilled holes into the side pieces to accept the side spike things (not pictured).

The cross piece that bridges the two side hilt pieces was made from a flat piece of PVC sheet and styrene. The plan is to cast it flat and then bend it around the crystal while the resin is still pliable.

The metal detail bits on the side hilt pieces are furniture tacks that I sanded down to size and glued down. With all of the pieces done, I put them in clay for molding!

Cut to two days later and the silicone molds are done! The plan is to cold cast the pieces in plastic resin with bronze powder.

Here are a couple of cold cast pieces, one that has been buffed with 00 steel wool and one that has not.

The crystal was cast from Tap Plastic’s Clear-Lite resin with some green and blue transparent tint added. It took nearly 2 days to fully cure, and the outer layer remained rather tacky and hard to sand, but once I got through, that it buffed up quite nicely.

With all of the pieces cast and buffed, it was time for assembly! Some screws were added to add support to where the side pieces attach to the crystal. Those screws will be obscured by the cross piece. I also put a 1/4″ threaded rod through the hilt that goes all the way from the handle piece to the crystal.

Final assembly!

I figured that the game art was a pretty good place to start for references, so I did most of my work from this image here.

I decided that this would be an excellent chance for me to try out Pepakura for the first time. I dusted off my 3D modeling skills and made a rough likeness of the mask in Maya. I used my own head for scale, because I figured that if it could fit on my giant melon head, it would fit on nearly anyone else’s head.

The .obj of the model was plugged into Pepakura Designer and I unfolded the thing. If you’d like to see how that’s done, just to a search on YouTube, there are loads of videos detailing it.

Once I had the Pepakura files all laid out, I printed them on heavy card stock, cut them out, and glued all of them together. Then the back side of the mask got some MDF and styrene supports.

To start giving the mask a bit of rigidity, I slathered the outside surface in fiberglass resin. Once that hardened, the back side got the full fiberglass treatment!

Now that the mask was all kinds of stiff, I faired out the faceted faces with a whole lot of Bondo.

Up until now our Juggernaut was blind! I went ahead and gave him some eye holes. You’ll also notice that the mask has been sanded a whole lot and is nice and smooth compared to the faceted look it had from the Pepakura process.

Finally this bad boy got some paint! It was sprayed with an off-white enamel and clear coated. Then the red lines were hand painted on with some more enamels. Tah-dah! I also added some foam and elastic to the back side of the mask so that it could be worn.

That’s it, all done!

She is a Demon Hunter from Diablo III, sporting a pistol crossbow! We kept the project under wraps during construction, so photos are a bit sparse, but I’ll do what I can to explain the build.

The pistol crossbow was made form 4 layers of 3/4″ pine that were adhered with wood glue. The profile shape of the middle two layers was cut out with a scroll saw before the two additional layers at the nose of the bow were added. Nuts were glued in place at the nose to attach the cross piece later.

The entire thing was stained and holes were drilled to accept all of the hardware pieces later. I cut a groove in the butt of the handle to paint later and create the illusion that the end is capped in a metal piece.

The cross piece was made from 1/4″ foam PVC, heated and curved to my liking. The two spikes coming out of the front are both cool looking and serve to attach the cross piece to the stock. The cross piece can be removed for travel.

The rest of the “metal” hardware is styrene and PVC that has been painted with metallic paint. The hardware pieces were nailed and epoxied into place. The cross decorations were sculpted in Sculpy and copied by making a clay push mold and cast in polyurethane resin.

All of the armor pieces were made from EVA foam floor mats. Yes, the same ones from my Mass Effect armor that I got at the hardware store for super cheap. I had to heat and bend the foam into some rather unnatural shapes. Most of the seams were covered in thinner EVA craft foam, because they were hideous. The rest of the embellishments on the armor were done with the same craft foam, so you can’t even tell that the seams were there. Also pictured: corned beef sandwich. It was delicious.

I knew I would be putting a lot of paint on these armor pieces, so I sealed them up really well with 2-3 layers of Mod Podge. Then everything got several coats of paint via my airbrush. The darker areas were also airbrushed, then I hand brushed over the seams/embellishments with the lighter color to make them really stand out.

The boots are really just shin covers that were designed to go over a normal pair of shoes. They were created with the thinner EVA craft foam. They Velcro up the back while wearing. In this next photo you can still see some of the Mod Podge that hasn’t dried yet. I realize that the foam colors don’t match, but these got covered in paint, so no foul.

The corset part was also done in thin craft foam and painted to look like leather with straps and buckles. It has a 2″ wide nylon strap around the waist to attach it to the wearer and several other strategic Velcro bits. In fact, all of these pieces were attached to the under shirt via strategic Velcro bits. I played bass for Strategic Velcro Bits.

This is one of my favorite beers; Full Sail LTD. It’s awesome and I put a cocktail parasol in it. This was cracked open when I finished all of the armor bits as a tiny celebration. Basically, I found this photo on my phone and just wanted to share it with you.

The pants were done entirely in fabric paint markers. The base is a pair of dark gray women’s athletic pants. All of the details were drawn on by hand. It turns out all of those geeky art classes paid off. Suck it jocks.

Finally, here are all of the pieces of the costume, laid out on the floor. I sewed up a hood/cape from linen and sewed a bunch of Velcro onto a brown shirt to be used to attach all of the armor bits to the wearer’s torso. Also there are some gloves. I think I found them at a costume store, but I can’t be sure because that was like 2 days before Dragon*Con and I was delirious.