I'm going to be out of town until the 5th, at which point I shall wrap myself up in a work cocoon from which I shall not emerge until after Otakon. (I'll try to finish the embossing tutorial as soon as I can but I can't give you an ETA on that....)

JoAnn's fabric has craft foam on sale for 40 percent off. That stuff rarely goes on sale so if you plan on working with it a lot, now's the time to get it.

Sorry for the delay, folks. Been working pretty hard on Otakon orders. Plus I'm trying to finish my Queen Esther costume so I can get some nice outdoor pictures taken of it before the snow starts to fly again. (Don't scoff. Some parts of this state were blanketed with it earlier this month. And we're nowhere NEAR a mountain range...)

So anyway, I last left off the tutorial with my making a heart shape out of styrene and foam. After drawing the design I was going to emboss onto the heart shape, I took my hotglue gun....

Carefully, I squeezed out a stream of hotglue onto the areas of the design that I wanted to be raised:



I had to make sure I applied the hotglue one line or one shape at a time, with plenty of space in between the areas of freshly applied glue. (This kept the design from running together and becoming indistinct.)



Now, if I had chosen to, I could have painted the surface with metallic enamel. I could also have brushed in some brown, black, or red enamel paint to make the surface of the ornament appear rusted or antiqued. But since this ornament was going to be placed on the wearer's body in a position where it was likely to be sat on, I elected to coat the heart shape with gold metallic vinyl instead.



You can find metallic PVC vinyl on ebay (some sellers there sell it by the yard) or you can find it online at http://www.mjtrends.com/ JoAnn's fabric stores will often sell metallic or colored PVC vinyl around Halloween time, (and if you're really lucky, you might be able to find it there deeply discounted at the end of the Halloween season.)The PVC vinyl will have the shiny surface on one side, and a plain white surface on the other.

To begin the embossing process, I laid down my foam and styrene heart onto the plain side of the fabric and drew a line around it that was spaced about an inch and a half away from the heart on all sides. I then cut around the line with a scissors.




Okay, here's a good place to end for now. Next time we'll discuss attaching the backside of the vinyl to the raised surface of the ornament.


Whoa...

This just in: G-Man from the Half Life series has a scary, dark-eyed sister who works as an editor for Rolling Stone Magazine (The uncannyness begins at 2:55. Brace yourselves. Then go watch Freeman's Mind to relax and get THOSE ALIEN EYES out of your head.)

Sorry I haven't finished the vinyl tutorial yet. I'm working on another Final Fantasy XI costume. Lots of gold dangly bits. Real time eaters. I'll post the rest of the tutorial as soon as I can....

Before I begin, I would like to know how you place a sticky or a permanent banner at the top of your livejournal page that will remain there even as you add new entries to your journal. It's probably a stupidly simple process that I could look up in about three seconds, but if anyone knows how to do it offhand, I would appreciate it if you told me.

Annnyway....

Wow. This page has been rather desolate lately. It's all my fault--I've been wrapped up in my own little prop experiments lately and I barely acknowledge this page exists. I'm also not out promoting myself around the web as aggressively as I should so people aren't sure if I'm still into this whole "costuming thing" or not. I'm sorry about this. I'll try to be better in the future.

That said, I've stumbled upon a new way to create a decorated surface for an object or a piece of armor. It doesn't require you to paint the surface and doesn't allow for a sharp amount of detail (so if you want to create a finely-detailed piece with a lot of painted-in subtleties, this might not be the method for you.) What it does do is create an object that looks as though it was fashioned out of tooled metal (which is an interesting effect and one you may want to create after viewing this tutorial.)

Here's the object that I'll be making (circled in blue):



It's a fuzzy screenshot with not a lot of detail, so I'm free to use my imagination in putting the object together.

Step One was to draw the general shape of the heart onto a piece of 3mm thick craft foam:



To ensure the symmetry of the piece, I cut out one side of the heart with a scissors, folded it over and then traced and cut out the other side.



I cut a heart-shaped piece out of the middle of the craft foam and then hotglued the craft foam onto a scrap of .020" styrene.



I cut away the excess styrene around the heart, remembering also to cut out the styrene in the heart-shaped piece lying in the middle of the foam.



Using a keen eye and my own imagination, I drew the design that I wanted to emboss onto the surface of the styrene. I tried not to make any area within the design wider than 1/2" since doing so would make the next few steps of this process difficult.



Next update: coating the piece with shiny shiny vinyl.

Any questions so far? Feel free to leave me a comment....

Which was nice considering it's the middle of fricken JUNE already. The recent unseasonable coolness actually made me suspect snow when I looked out my window and saw white fluffy stuff falling from the sky. It was only cottonwood seeds though. In Quarry Park they pile up until they're a good 2-3 inches thick and since I have mad allergies, I'll have to avoid that place for awhile.

Everyone must be busy this time of year. I am too but I managed to steal enough time to go to a neighborhood garage sale where I stumbled upon a free box filled with leather belts and buckles which should come in handy for my costuming. I also found some silvery fur which I hope to turn into doll wigs at some point.

I'm working on a vinyl PVC embossing tutorial. I've learned it's possible to make foam and vinyl pieces that look as though they were made out of a sheet of tooled brass. (It's a neat effect although it does require a certain amount of practice with the materials to get something that looks good.) I'll try to post the tutorial in the near future. In the meantime, if anyone has any questions for me about styrene or anything I've made recently, I'd love to hear from you!

Teresa (AA)

I've been futzing around with vinyl for the past few days:



YIKES. That picture of the claw reminds me of the green foggy Angel of Death thing that descended from the sky in the old Ten Commandments movie. (That scene and the entirety of the movie Poltergeist are why I wasn't able to sleep without a nightlight for the first 18 years of my life. Shudder.)




I use PVC vinyl fabric to coat styrene, craft foam or both, so that's nothing new. What I have been doing that's new is experimenting with ways to create embossed patterns underneath the vinyl (which is how I made the raised bumps on the claw's palm and finger pieces.) I simply made the bumps out of hotglue, waited for them to cool, squeezed on a thin layer of hotglue around the outer edges of the bumps and then pressed the vinyl on over the bumps, smoothing the vinyl out with my fingers as best I could. It takes a bit of practice to get embossed shapes with smooth lines and borders. The results are worth the hassle though, I think.

I'm experimenting with adhesive-backed chrome too, although trying to cover any styrene piece that's larger than 4" square is the kind of delicate operation not meant for weak or cowardly minds.

The weather's been nice, and I find I can avoid ticks in the woods if I stay on wide gravel paths and not go anyplace that's mysterious and/or fun. *Sigh.* Oh well. September will be here soon enough and Nature will smite those unholy, bloodthirsty demonbugs and I will RULE THE WOR--er...I'll be able to go off the beaten paths and do some explorin'. Mwahahaha!

Just letting you know that I'm still around. I haven't posted anything recently because I've been working on some more experimental stuff. I've discovered three new methods for making props and armor in just the past week (using materials I'm already familiar with, but I'm doing new things with them.) I'll try and post pictures of the projects as soon as I can so you can (I'm hopin') be duly impressed.

I've figured out that it costs about 5 dollars to mail one sheet of styrene, about 8.50 to mail two sheets and about 10.50 to mail three. At least so far. I'm surprised the amount of people overseas who are interested in buying the styrene. (I'm guessing it's hard to come by in some places.) I'll try to slap together a banner that I can sticky to the top of the page to remind visitors that I'm selling styrene. I also want to put together a 5th book in my "how to make costume props and armor" book series detailing the new stuff that I've recently learned, although I keep on coming up with new methods and materials which make me postpone the actual writing of the book. (Well that and, it's summer so it's hard to find the time to do anything as cerebral as write a book. Even one that's mostly pictures.)

I'll try to get my e-mail inbox cleared out and have everything answered as soon as I can. In the meantime, enjoy this cute video of a cat stalking its evil mirror twin from the planet Vorplax:

Styrene For Sale! At last! The magic ingredient for making lightweight and realistic-looking armor is now easily available to all US residents! Each roll measures 24" x 48", is .020" thick and is opaque white in color. 1 Roll - 10.00 plus $4.95 shipping. 2 Rolls -20.00 plus 6.00 shipping. (A savings of 2 dollars off the cost of shipping). 3 rolls or more - Ask for price and shipping quote. Styrene is easy to work with and .020" thick styrene is an excellent thickness for vacuumforming. If you have any questions about the material, drop me a line at dietzt@cloudnet.com or leave a comment in my Prop Blog! Click Here to Order Some Styrene Today!

Okay. That's the official party line on the styrene and how much I'm going to charge for it. I hope everyone had a good Memorial Day. Ours was bright and sunny, but very windy (hence the coals on our barbeque were burning as bright as Chernobyl; my friend Jared actually got most of the hair on one of his arms singed off as he was trying to move the food on the grill.) The park my friends and I were in was nice and shady and situated next to a small river. We found a distressingly large amount of open clamshells by the side of the river (which means that the birds either got the clams or some Captain Planet villain has opened up a "Sludge-R-Us" factory upstream.) The river SEEMED clean but I wouldn't really know if it was...

Got some vinyl chrome sheeting in the mail that I'm going to experiment with. Will let you know if anything good comes of it. (Tell your friends about the styrene, OK? Theyinnnnnks! ^_^)

I've discovered that a 24" x 48" roll weighs under a pound and can thus be sent anywhere in the US for 4.95. The roll itself will cost 10 dollars, and shipping will make it 14.95. Two rolls will cost about 8 dollars to ship, so I might want to offer some sort of deal for buying two rolls at a time. (One roll should be enough to tackle any mid-size project, btw.) If you're interested in buying any styrene from me, just e-mail me at dietzt@cloudnet.com.

I walked in a local park by the Misissippi river today and saw a mother duck and a bunch of newly hatched ducklings which were hiding in a bunch of reeds by the edge of the river. Around them were about a dozen male mallards acting duckshit crazy. (At one point, three of them ganged up on another and looked for all the world like they were trying to either mate with him or drown him. Probably a combination of both. Damn. Never knew the Duck World could be so brutal.)

This clip SO needs some "Jaws" music to go with it. You'll see what I mean:

I'm making the sword in this picture. At first I tried carving it out of styrofoam and coating it with an airdry clay. Unfortunately, the clay I had chosen (DAS clay) smelled really bad and was extremely heavy--even a thin 1/8" coating was enough to push the sword into the "I don't want to have to lug this thing around with me the entire day" stage. So I tore off all of the clay and started coating the exterior of the sword with scraps of tagboard and styrene. Once all of the styrofoam had been covered, I had this:



I have to coat it with a neat layer of styrene and then paint it. (I found some nice chrome vinyl sheeting on ebay and bought some to experiment with. I hope it's not too difficult to work with because that stuff is a little on the spendy side and I don't want to have to toss it.)

Oh, I did discover an easier way to get styrofoam crumblies off of a cat: Just wet a cloth and rub it over the affected areas of its body. (She won't like it, but at least she won't turn into the Tasmanian Devil and julienne your arms.)

Wow. The kid who made this video is very talented:



I only hope Disney's law-ninjas don't slap him with a C and D because I'd love to see more of his work.

Whilst Youtubing today, I also happened to spot this classic of Canadian Animation:



I don't know what's more entertaining: the short, or the comments left by the SERIOUS BUSINESS opera fans wharrgarbling over the idea of someone poking fun at their hobby. (Saints forbid they ever see any Bugs Bunny cartoons. Their collective heads would explode in a shower of brain matter and pretentiousness.)

Gonna try to relax this weekend. Looks like Sunny might have caught my cold. Either that or she has hay fever. Poor lolkitty.