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....