StrikingCosplay
New Member
Hello everyone!
As a long time lurker here I have benefited immensely from the knowledge these forums contain and I wanted to give some back. It was about a year ago after attending my second con that the idea popped into my head to do a Witch King build. I started looking into how/if it would be possible and I can honestly say I under estimated what the project it would become.
Thanks to some awesome posts on here and similar sites I managed to finish it and got to wear it to its debut convention two weekends ago!
So on to the good stuff. I wanted to do a write up about the processes I used to make my Witch King build, mistakes and all(I'll admit up front that I am a bit of a perfectionist) !
Where to start...
I suppose the first major thing I did was the helmet. I was familiar with Pepakura and paper craft but had never done much with it before. I looked around and found a great paper craft for the Witch King helmet. The first one I printed out was too small :facepalm... so for the second round I sat down the figured out the dimensions better and it was perfect!
Next it was time for resin and fiberglass. I started out coating the outside with just resin and this worked great to provide some stability to the paper form. I did find out that the card stock loses a decent amount of its rigidity when wet with resin. Thankfully this didn't cause any major issues.
Next I applied fiberglass to the inside of the helmet. This one is a bit odd because unlike traditional helmets there is only a ring for the back half of the helmet and the spike is in the open. I did something I had seen online and applied all the fiberglass mats ahead of time using some spray adhesive. It worked great to hold all the mesh in place and allowed me to coat it with resin all at once without having to worry about placing new mats as I went.
With the fiberglass done I moved on to the spikes. The best way I could come up with at the time was to take a wood dowel and chop it down to look like a spike. It ended up looking really good but took forever. They are a bit bigger then what you see in the movie but I ended up liking the look better anyway haha.
Next it was time for Bondo. This was the first time I had really worked with Bondo and man did I pay the newbie price for that in sanding lol. It took much longer then I would've wanted it to but I got it looking pretty good.
Once the sanding was done I happily painted...
This is when my first major mistake showed itself... :facepalm I was unhappy with some of my bondo work. It was smooth but in a few places it had the wrong look. I know I should've seen this before I painted everything but I guess a part of me was in a hurry(impatience won out over perfection). Due to this mistake I went back and sanded off the paint and did some Rondo (resin/bondo) crude casting. I did this in the nose area and around the head band. In the end with was one of the best things I could've done since it helped make everything very solid and looked 10x better!
With the helmet repainted and in good condition I moved on to the gauntlets.
The build for the rest of the armor will be in later posts!
As a long time lurker here I have benefited immensely from the knowledge these forums contain and I wanted to give some back. It was about a year ago after attending my second con that the idea popped into my head to do a Witch King build. I started looking into how/if it would be possible and I can honestly say I under estimated what the project it would become.
Thanks to some awesome posts on here and similar sites I managed to finish it and got to wear it to its debut convention two weekends ago!
So on to the good stuff. I wanted to do a write up about the processes I used to make my Witch King build, mistakes and all(I'll admit up front that I am a bit of a perfectionist) !
Where to start...
I suppose the first major thing I did was the helmet. I was familiar with Pepakura and paper craft but had never done much with it before. I looked around and found a great paper craft for the Witch King helmet. The first one I printed out was too small :facepalm... so for the second round I sat down the figured out the dimensions better and it was perfect!
Next it was time for resin and fiberglass. I started out coating the outside with just resin and this worked great to provide some stability to the paper form. I did find out that the card stock loses a decent amount of its rigidity when wet with resin. Thankfully this didn't cause any major issues.
Next I applied fiberglass to the inside of the helmet. This one is a bit odd because unlike traditional helmets there is only a ring for the back half of the helmet and the spike is in the open. I did something I had seen online and applied all the fiberglass mats ahead of time using some spray adhesive. It worked great to hold all the mesh in place and allowed me to coat it with resin all at once without having to worry about placing new mats as I went.
With the fiberglass done I moved on to the spikes. The best way I could come up with at the time was to take a wood dowel and chop it down to look like a spike. It ended up looking really good but took forever. They are a bit bigger then what you see in the movie but I ended up liking the look better anyway haha.
Next it was time for Bondo. This was the first time I had really worked with Bondo and man did I pay the newbie price for that in sanding lol. It took much longer then I would've wanted it to but I got it looking pretty good.
Once the sanding was done I happily painted...
This is when my first major mistake showed itself... :facepalm I was unhappy with some of my bondo work. It was smooth but in a few places it had the wrong look. I know I should've seen this before I painted everything but I guess a part of me was in a hurry(impatience won out over perfection). Due to this mistake I went back and sanded off the paint and did some Rondo (resin/bondo) crude casting. I did this in the nose area and around the head band. In the end with was one of the best things I could've done since it helped make everything very solid and looked 10x better!
With the helmet repainted and in good condition I moved on to the gauntlets.
The build for the rest of the armor will be in later posts!
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