1 Month-To-Build Gambit Costume

[CinnamonB]

Well, Halloween has come and is now long gone, and here I am finally getting here to mention it.

Ladies and Gents, Gambit:

My biggest regret is not getting more pictures taken...


Ok, so what we have here is a randomly-found brown rain-trench with purple silk interior (what?.). This had to be modified because it was extra-large and I am not. I'm like, MediuLarge, so the shoulder straps were tightened to bring up the arms, and then stapled in place.

The Leg guards are plexiglass with Krylon chrome spraypaint. I used a thin piece of plastic (think saran wrap) to wrap around my leg. This was used to size it, because once my leg was wrapped I cut up along the back to make a 2-d pattern of my lower leg. This was dremmeled out of the plexiglass, then I had the great joy of sitting in a chair for 3 hours, heating up the plexi over the stove and wrapping it around my legs.

That hurt, and I now hate plastic.


Most of this is pretty straight forward, but it's the Cowl that is my pride and joy. So much work went into it.

No, I'm not drunk, I'm distracted...

This cowl is composed of black cotton stretch weave, very thin black vinyl, bristol board, Liqui-Stitch latex fabic adhesive (which smells like cat pee while drying. I'm glad that faded fast.), Velcro Glue, and most importantly, staples.

I first wrapped my head in green painters tape, then carefully drew onto it the shape i needed. This was cut off my head, and then the parts were trimmed and cut from vinyl to form the following panels:

I worked out the stretch ratio for the cotton weave, measured the diameter of my neck, and made a tube with a slightly smaller diameter. The 3:1 stretch ratio made it so it could still fit over my head.

Then, with the patience of a madman, I sat still for 3 and a half hours with a tube of black material over my face and neck as my housemate carefully glued every panel into place using the Liquistitch.

The holes were then cut out, and identical copies of the panels were cut out of bristol board and glued to the inside of the cowl to stop the panels from curling up under the pull of the cotton.

Staples were used on the bit just above my adams apple to pull the cheeks in tight, and there it was:

I'm going to have lunch now, and then I'll talk about the chest-plate (which took forever), the Gloves and the gorget (neck collar thing).

Later,

Myster Mistery

 

[Darth Mule]

Wow. I have to say. That's pretty good work for doing things completely the wrong way. Don't take this post the wrong way. I think you have one of the better Gambits I've seen, but hot plexi on your leg? Staples? Nice to see someone suffering for their art, but you could end up injuring yourself that way. I see you are new to us tho, and you will soon learn many neat tricks to overcome the risk of encasing yourself in hot plastic. For example, they have those cardboard tubes at Lowe's for making concrete pillars and such. They come in many different sizes. And you can mold hot plastic around them.

Great Gambit tho. Seriously. Good work.

 

[Phayze]

Very nice Gambit. :thumbsup I especially like the cowl - do have any more pictures of it on you? I'd love a better look at the sides.

Another trick that I like to use for forming stuff to my body is to make a duct tape duplicate of the part in question and form stuff around that. All you need is a roll of duct tape, some nylons, and some scissors - put the nylons on whatever you want to make the dummy of (legs, arms, your whole body), wrap it in a few layers of duct tape, cut it off (CAREFULLY..) then tape it back together and stuff with cotton batting, old t-shirt scraps, newspaper, or whatever else you have laying around.

I made an arm like that for making some bracers and is worked pretty well.

 

[CinnamonB]

Don't worry, I'm well aware that using my own legs was the worst possible idea. I wasted 6 days trying to find an alternative method.

I even went to the Art department on campus (they've got creepy-realistic wooden manniquens and high-density resin manniquins for exactly this thing) and asked them if they would let me use one, in their studio, with people present so i could do this without injuries.

They took one look at my Engineering leather jacket and told me to get out of the building. Nice people.


I thought of using shin guards, flexible plastic, foam sheeting, but i couldn't get any in time. I literally did the leg guards the day of the party.

The trick was wrapping my legs in a single layer of dish towel, and then wearing jeans over top. It hurt, but it was completely bearable. It was just like really hot bathwater: won't injure you, but it does hurt.


As for the staples, that was also due to time and budget constraints. The staples on the cowl were because I overshot the bristolboard in terms of rigitity, and they were sticking out from my cheeks. The staples squeezed it tight, keeping them against my cheeks. I've since replaced it with a button snap.

The problem is that with the cowl, after an hour i yawned and snapped the staples. So, every pic after that, one cheek would lift away from my face. Now that it's repaired it looks good again, but it kinda makes me look a little goofy in the halloween pics...

In this pic, the cheek nearest the camera is holding properly, while the other's pulling away.

...And in this one it's the opposite



I'll post more later. I've got more fun university stuff to do, thanks to a prof who doesn't like admitting he tested us on stuff that's not even in our course, and as such i have a make-up take home midterm due in 6 days. which is 2 days before an exam. WHEEEEEEEEE.

 

[MandalorFett]

Great looking Gambit, he's highly overlooked. I hope you worked on a smart-alec French accent to go with it. :lol

:thumbsup
:fettrotj

 

[Darth Kahnt]

Nice suit but DAMN that must have hurt.

 

[CinnamonB]

Quick word of warning to anyone thinking about doing what i did: DO NOT WET THE CLOTH OR YOUR JEANS.

Even though water has that nice high heat capacity, it has the miraculous ability to conduct that heat about 5 times better than the air-coton combo, and you think that your leg is in lava.

So yeah, dry does hurt, but you get used to it by the end. The whole last half hour was actually quite comfy. Just the first 2 hours felt like toture.

 

[CinnamonB]

Ok, the chestplate:

The chestplate was the hardest part of this costume, simply due to the time wasted looking for something to start with. I couldn't just wear a spandexish shirt, because it would look like crap. And, oddly enough, after 3 weeks of looking and driving and hunting, I couldn't find any roman-style chestplates anywhere. If I had found one of those it would have been 4 hours with some Bondo, sandpaper and spraypaint. Instead, I had to scratch build it.

This was a problem. I was down to 4 days, and I have no method of plastic forming or foam forming where i am (as proven by the hot-plastic on legs solution from before) So, I went on an internet safari. Thanks to google image search, I managed to find this pic:

It's a paintball armor vest. But more importantly it looks like Techno-Muscle, and it's all flatish panels. The ball was in Farnsworth's court now.

See, I'm an Engineering student. Mechanical specifically. I've got an aptitude for 3-D shapes and interesting solutions to said 3-D shapes (which reminds me: someone remind me in a week, and I'll post my design for a collapsing bowstaff that doesn't use the old telescoping tubes trick) I looked at this vest and just thought "oh, good. Geometry."

40 minutes later I had 10 panels of Cinnimon bristol board cut out to form these panels in my size. I lined them up to the gaps I wanted, used green painters tape to hold them in their locations, and then used their shape to trace out a pattern on my thin black vinyl material. I eyeballed straps for it, cut it out, and one-by-one glued the bristol to the porous backside of the vinyl.

Once dried, I had a helpful housemate hold it in place while I sized it and fastened the shoulder bits and the mid-section strap. It's actually securd using utility web and a buckle behind my back, which i sized and fastened while still wearing it (pinned it in place and then turned it around on me so i could see what i was doing) For the fastening (you're all gonna cringe), I used...STAPLES...

um...yeah, I just counted, there are 58 staples in the vest alone. it worked great because i could do the fastening one-handed, and it didn't matter becasue the trench covers everything up at the back anyways.


Gloves:

I found a pair of black "Dynamax" gloves at a hardware store. VERY comfortable, they look great, and amazing dexterity. Plus, thanks to an inexplicable secton of neoprene inbetween all the fingers, I could throw cards 100 feet through the bar with nothing more than a flick of the wrist. That kept me amused for a long time.

Gorget:

This thing was irritating. I ended up just getting frustrated and chopping up an old shirt i didn't like anymore to make a template. Then I cut it out of vinyl, and used a combo of glue and staples to attach some stretchy cotton to the back, making me able to pull it on over my head. I then silver-trimmed it with a Sharpie Metallic Silver felt pen. I don't suggest this, because even with 4 hours of drying the silver slowly rubs off and spreads. My whole gorget is dry-brushed with silver now, which looks good for it, but would have ruined anything else.


Ok, I think that's all. I'll post other stuff later. There's an event this ween that the cowl's gonna make an appearance at .