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.)

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....