Hello! To start off the new year I would like to go back to a mis-hap we had in 2014. Instead of smashing this project and raging about it. We were able to make a mistake work and dammit, I’m proud of that!
I call this small tutorial “When life gives you lemons, you give it battle damage!”
(so I’m not the best with names…)
We have a few things in the works that we’ve been wanting to put in our Etsy store to sell. This was one of them. We wanted to do a Baroness armor set based off of the one we had made for my own costume. We re-made the buck to vacu-form this light weight armor.
In the first picture you can see what happened when we were trying to vacu-form our mold. It ended up looking like Gieger designed armor for Cobra now (which could be cool, but I digress). After much cursing and tears, we decided to move on and fix it for a future date.
Picture 2 is after we poured plaster and epoxy into the back of the plastic messed up version. This is my progress of trying to sand and fix the buck (while also pretending I was a high-class surgeon apparently…)
Picture 3 (left to right) is of my next disappointment. The epoxy and plaster created some unknown air pockets when they met. We didn’t find out about these until I had spent a week fixing everything and making it pristine only to have it crush down on the air pockets and make it look all crumpled. Once the second round of crying and cursing was over, I decided to try to fix it. I needed it for an even that week so this was my last attempt.
Picture 4 and 5 are of the damaged pulls that I sanded and added some “battle damage” to. I googled some images of bullet ricochet’s and other metal damage to try to get the shapes right. I dremmeled the bullet spots in to give some dimension. I then added some lines with the dremmel to look like sword hits. (encounters with snake eyes!)
Picture 6 and 7 are the pieces painted up. I used matte and gloss coats to try to give more visual interest since it’s hard to do color variations with black. (I’m going to go back and make this more pronounced later) I panted the exposed metal with silver rub n buff. **Tip, don’t spray a sealer over metallic run n buff colors, it dulls them significantly. then the emblem was on and they were strapped!
Picture 8 is from our photo shoot with it. Our location was perfect for the “battle damaged” look. One last little surprise was coming my way… I got a giant cold sore on my face! UGH!! After more tears I decided, eff it, Imma battle damage myself too! This thing was too noticeable to try to conceal so I borrowed some fake blood from Deb and Paul, gave myself a few make-uped bruises to match, and I was good to go!
Moral of this, sometimes your mistakes and get some great creative thinking going and other times you just have to start over. No matter what the situation, always learn from them. Mistakes are just as important as successes.
