Samus Aran's Varia Suit - Cheap Speed Build

My wife and I have been busy the last few days building Samus Aran's varia suit from scratch. It's been quite the tackle because there aren't really any tutorials for this build. We started out by making some paper templates from scratch and then resizing them here and there until we had the chest piece completed. From there we went to the arms, stomach plates, ribs, and cod. We then purchased some cheap bowls and glued them together to make the shoulders. After the shoulders we began working on the left hand, shoes, and the side plates that go from the belly to the back. We are using foam and plastic for the build. The chest piece, ribs, arms, legs, and shoes are foam. The plates on the abdomen, the cod, and the shoulders are plastic. We bought a biker helmet at a thrift store that we will modify into the Samus Aran helmet. This is an economic build, so we haven't been going all out with our materials. We are trying to get the best material possible for the lowest cost. In total, we have spent around $40 on the suit. We purchased our 1/4 inch eva foam at big lots. The plastic is all cut from extra large storage containers (the kind that people stuff when they move) for $2.00 a piece - we bought two of them. We used a soldering tool to burn the design into the foam, hot glue to glue the pieces together, and a box cutter to cut all of the plastic and foam pieces. We used some wide elastic to attach a few of the pieces (like in completing the cod and also attaching the chest and back pieces together underneath the arms (not yet shown in any pictures)). I'll be sure to post more pictures as we get further along. We are trying to finish this soon because we are trying to make it to the SLC comicon

Here is a shot I took a couple days ago. We haven't done too much since this shot was taken. We have only attached the back and chest pieces together. Buckled the ribs onto them. Made gloves. And made side plates for the abdomen.


Here is what we cut our plastic pieces from. As you can see, I have traced what her cod (aka underwear) will look like. Once I cut it out, I placed it into the oven for about 1-2 min and then removed it, shaped it to fit my wife, and then ran cold water over it so that it would retain the new shape.



Here is what the chest piece was looking like when I first started to put it together.



Here are the shoulder pieces (paldrons?). They cheapest thing available, aside from paper mache (which, as you can see, we also attempted but failed at), were these plastic bowls from Dollar Tree. Once we cut them a bit, they turned out to be just what we needed.



Here is a photo of the back piece before I knew how I was going to connect it to the chest piece. (I feel like a lot of this is make it up as you go kind of work).



Here is another picture of the chest piece (upper and lower), both upper arms, lower left arm (not yet assembled), belly plates, and plastic undies.

I know there should be some Papercraft files floating around the net if you want better references for the suit, but so far its looking good.

I've been very busy and unable to get around to updating this build. So far, my wife and I have done some painting, lighting, and made a few new parts for the Salt Lake City Comic-Con .


Spray painted the ribs, body plates, and underwear thing gold.


Plastidipped the arms.


Made the boots.


After plastidipping the foam, we sprayed a white enamel spray paint over the foam so that the colors we chose for the suit wouldn't come out dark as a result of the gray foam.


Here is what the upper-back was looking like while we were spray painting it.


Here is the first coat of orange that we used on the arms. (For some reason the orange came out blotchy .)


Here is a layout of the various aerosols we used. We started with a coat of plastidip ($5.00), then white enamel ($1.00), then either gold ($3.50), red ($8.50), or orange ($8.40) depending on the piece.


Here is the front of the chest while we were painting it.


Here is the side of the chest while we were painting it.


Here is what the chest looked like once I cut the holes out for the green lights to go into.


Here is what one side of the light fixture looks like that I will place into the chest. We bought a few yards of green led strips. They are nice because we can use them in the chest, helmet, and shoulders .


Okay, so I have a lot of photos of the shoulders. These, for me, were extremely tricky (especially because I am not using any templates). We glued two $1.00 bowls from Dollar Tree together and then started to cut pieces of foam to put on top of it. It was difficult because we had to find the right size bowls, cut the foam so that it was flush and round on top of the bowls... and yeah, basically that was why it was so hard lol.

So, in this photo I have the front foam piece glued onto both shoulders.


This photo shows what placing the rectangular foam pieces onto the top of the shoulders looks like once the front and back foam pieces have been attached.


Here, all three rectangular foam pieces are attached to the tops of the shoulders.


This picture shows the spacing for those three rectangles.


Here are the mostly finished shoulder pieces.


And this is a side shot of the shoulders.