Muscle Suit build for Captain Britain Cosplay

So I am going to a Superhero themed BBQ. I was planning on buying a set of Iron Man armour but the awesome coofunkcurly/finhead stuff disappeared and now I have left it too late so.. I decided to go as my favourite though less well known hero Captain Britain.

I have found somebody to sew the spandex suit for me based on the suit Captain Britain wore in the run up to and early days of Excalibur (IMHO the best suit).

However the problem is, and reason I have avoided Spandex in the past, is that unless you are actually built like a Superhero (which I am not) you end up looking a bit tragic. So I figured the best solution would be a muscle suit.

I did some research and came across Flex design costumes who make some awesome muscle suits but they are a bit overkill for my needs.

I figured the best solution would be to roll my own with a flesh coloured zentai suit and some upholstery foam.

Zentai Suit, and electric knife have been ordered. My next decision is which foam would be best. Do I go for the cheaper low density foam or would something denser be best.

Has anybody done this sort of thing before and got any hints/tips/gotchas I should look out for?

Cheers
Andrew

upholstry foam is really expensive and tell ya the truth kind of a pain in the but to carve even with a carving knife. You can make general shapes easy but rounding out the belly of the muscle isnt very easy. depends how much muscle mass you need to help you out with your foam choice

yeah, I basically hate using uphoslstry foam. There has to be a better way to do muscle suits like this.

I did some playing around last night with offcuts and trying to carve smooth looking shapes is indeed tiresome and doesn't look very good :/

With my last piece I had a brainwave though. I placed the foam on a couple of blocks at either end then stuck a weight in the middle to deform the foam. then I used a guide to make a straight cut. Once I took the weight off the foam popped back to its normal state but with a nice smooth curved cut in it.

Gonna get some more foam today and have a go at deforming over two directions. I reckon its possible that with appropriately shaped wooden formers it should be possible to cut some nice curves.

Andrew

Cool Captain Britain being made on the year of the Jubilee ........... im so keeping my eye on this one

How about this solution? I made this a long time ago, but it still fits and still works. Using the Butterick Batman pattern, I made two jumpsuits, sewed them together, stitched the muscles, slit the inside and stuffed them with Fibrefill. I don't know where you could get some, but here, I go to the local fabric shop, and a bag bigger than a pillow costs around $5-$6. A few of these, and you're done! It has a long zipper in the back, and yes, a fly for when nature calls!

nice job...

Thanks, nice to actually hear from somebody-I think it is good, too!

There is a really good tutorial on stan winstons site about making fatsuits, some of the same principles can be applied to a muscle suit.

Looch thats a great idea and would probably have been a bit easier than my current track!

After a short break away I am back on this.

First job was making a duct tape dummy. For anyone doing that don't try it alone! When you inevitably fall over and cant get back up its gonna be awkward! Fortunately by wife just laughed and took a picture!

then she helped me up!

I needed to stuff the dummy so I treated my 4 kids to a new set of pillows each and used the old ones and a couple of old sleeping bags to stuff the dummy using some 40mm pipe running from the shoulders to the feet to strengthen the dummy. Gotta say it looks freaky stood in my Garage right now wearing a flesh Zentai suit.

I am still playing around with techniques on getting good muscle shapes out of foam. Shaping with the electric turkey knife and then doing some smoothing with a sharp pair of scissors gets a rough shape but its not smooth enough. Polycotton wadding over the foam helps get rid of any lumps and bumps but I am looking for some thin foam to do the job which will hopefully be a bit firmer.

Dougie good find on the fatsuit tutorial looks llike it could be useful but I am not sure I wanna spend $20 to find out!


I have also started on a pepakura mask which I am tweaking atm. One I have done I will post it up here.

Hopefully get some more done this weekend.

Andrew

Oh snap. Two things struck me in this thread:

1- With all the Brits on this forum, im actually a little surprised the Captain from across the pond isnt more popular! I look forward to seeing the end result.

2 - Duct tape!!! Its so obvious now! Its an unrelated project, but I was wondering how I would get a body forming template of myself for a breastplate. Why didnt I think of that?!?! Duct tape truly does everything. Thanks for the inspiration.

artanor, looks like a gimp suit lol

artanor said:

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Dougie good find on the fatsuit tutorial looks llike it could be useful but I am not sure I wanna spend $20 to find out!

I have actually looked at it and there are some great tips in it!

Rest assured, all Stan Winston tutorials are top notch!! And definitely worth buying the streams! Worth registering and keeping an eye out for deals, I got that particluar stream for $10.

Art, almost had that problem with MY duct tape suit! Just so you know, there are also hot wire foam carving sets-one is a long blade-style, and the other is strung between two points for a cheese-slice style-just remember to wear a mask!

So I finished my suit. After many unsatisfactory attempts with foam I went with Looch's stitched pockets and stuff with wadding approach. I got a Zentai suit company to make the Suit itself, didn't quite turn out how I wanted it but I decided to go with it as time was tight. I think if I were to do this again I would go with dye sublimated Lycra to get the design just right.

I found some knee high blue boots on ebay and modified some welders gauntlets to make the gloves.

The mask I decided to make myself.

First off I scanned my head using a Kinect and some cool software called ReconstructMe. After a bit of Processing with Meshlab I then imported the mesh into Google Sketchup.


Then I got the work scaling the model within Sketchup to the correct scale by taking a few reference measurements on my actual head and resizing the model in Sketchup to match. Then I modelled the mask. The cube is a 100mm cube I put in so I could scale the model in Pepakura Designer accurately.


I then used a plugin for Sketchup to export the model into .obj format and imported it into Pepakura Designer. Took a while back and forth between Sketchup and Pepakura Designer to get the folds right so I didnt end up with a horrible final pep file.

I then assembled the pep (luckily I had a CraftRobo to cut it out for me) and did a test fit.


Next stage was hardening the mask. I needed to do this in a not very well ventilated Garage so I used Jesmonite. A thin first coat then a layer of Quad-axial glass fibre mat in the high stress areas (chin, ears, brow, and cheeks) and some thinner tissue type in the other areas. I think I used about a kilo of powder 400g of liquid in all. After a quick saning I got this.


I was running a bit short on time so didn't get any pictures of the rest of the process but it was basically a lot of sanding and a bit of filling with car body filler to get it smooth. Then a few coats of undercoat and a lot of masking off layering to get the flag detailing on the top of the mask.

To attach it to the hood of the suit I had already mounted magnets in the inside of the ear pods so I just had to sew magnets into the sides of the hood so the 2 would snap together when I placed the mask on my face.

The final result is below.

I am stood with a bunch of Heroes hired for the BBQ by the events company who were all a great bunch of people and we had an absolute blast of a day!

HAHAHAHA NO WAY!!!!! I am really good friends with the girl in the background dressed as Poison Ivy!!! how much of a coincidence is that!!!!
You did a great job on your costume though and helmet looks great

Small world! I though her Poison Ivy looked great. Her fiancée (Rorschach) works in the audio department at our place actually that reminds me I need to configure him a network switch tomorrow!

That turned out great, some of those guys look familiar maybe part of the UKG

Looks great man. The guy in green lantern looks like the guy heading 4th wall designs in the uk, if he is, he does a kick ass Cap Britain.

The costumers may be the same people, but if they were paid to attend, then they certainly wouldn't have been there representing the UKG, as that's against the club rules.

Is that poison ivy steph?

Nate

No Poison Ivy is a girl called Becky