Avengers!Loki Build (crossplay!)

[Deelite]

Holy crap thanks so much, that is crazy helpful! The wig claims to be heat safe to 400 degrees so do you think I could use a curling iron to get the flips in the back? And maybe set them with freeze spray for good measure?

I would be CAREFUL with a curling iron. Some people are successful, but some have totally ruined their wigs.

The safe way is the Hairspray method. What's nice is if you "mess" up, you simply wash the wig (with a small dab of shampoo in a sink full of water; siwsh your wig around and then rinse thoroughly and dry) , you can start over. Hairspray, blowdryer and some curlers or a good round brush can do much more and give you peace of mind.

I've used curling irons on wigs before, but I don't recommend it for anyone who has never styled a wig before. I've actually used a hair straightener to straighten a wavy wig out.

 

[ARC]

Hairspray, blowdryer and some curlers or a good round brush can do much more and give you peace of mind.

What about large-diameter hot rollers? Or will a round brush and a blow dryer on high have enough heat to give it a little bit of permanent curl? So I don't have to CAKE it with hairspray...

The wig is way longer than I need so maybe I will practice on the bits that will get cut off?

 

[moose]

greetings from the 352! everything looks to be coming along quite nicely, the muzzle looks great, as do the pants and top. nice job on the layers. funny that i'd come across this as soon i start looking at ideas for a group of gender bender avengers for halloween this year.

 

[ARC]

greetings from the 352! everything looks to be coming along quite nicely, the muzzle looks great, as do the pants and top. nice job on the layers. funny that i'd come across this as soon i start looking at ideas for a group of gender bender avengers for halloween this year.

For the Motherland!

Thanks for the compliments! Let me know if you have any questions! (Or need a Loki! :lol)

 

[Deelite]

What about large-diameter hot rollers?

They should work. Just be careful with anything that generates its own heat.

Or will a round brush and a blow dryer on high have enough heat to give it a little bit of permanent curl? So I don't have to CAKE it with hairspray...

As they say "less is more". you don't have to cake it with hair spray (otherwise, you are just weighing down the wig)

Hairspray is pretty much liquid plastic in aerosol form. So you're spraying plastic on to plastic (so it works great).

Your hairdryer on high is good enough.

The wig is way longer than I need so maybe I will practice on the bits that will get cut off?

good idea. if you can create a weft of hair (bundle some togehter and seal the end with CAULK - the kind used for bathtubs) , you can practice on that. Just be sure its long enough. If you have a styrofoam head form, just "pin" the weft where the caulk is to the form, and practice away.

Here is a good tutorial on how to make wefts:
Katie Bair's Petting Zoo Wigs

 

[Tamiwi]

Whoo, I love gals that choose male roles. No gender boundaries for us!!

Great job and keep up the fantastic build. The world always needs more Loki

 

[Eldritch Arts]

Hey there! Just wanted to say your costume looks EXCELLENT so far! I'm working on my own Loki costume, but with a definite Female styling to it Great job on the pants and tunic, i'm kind of dreading starting the criss-crossing on the chest. Also, the scales on the pants look fantastic. I found some cool fabric that gives the semblance of those in a smaller scale so i'm gonna just use that instead of making them by hand - so props for going all out! My deadline is in a week so .. might have to redo stuff more thoroughly once that event is over. Anyways, good luck with everything, I really like the look you are working on! I will keep checking back :]

 

[ARC]

Pfft, what's a gender boundary?? :lol

Thanks for all the lovely compliments! My boything will be in town shortly for the weekend so I'll be quiet for a while but I'm sure I'll be back at it Monday. For now, here's a shot of the leg armor panels after aging and varnishing, just waiting to get peeled off the paper scale by scale and stuck to the pants. UGH. :unsure

 

[honnziva]

I can't wait to see how this comes out, I love that you decided to go with loki, exciting!

 

[Jaina]

Pfft, what's a gender boundary?? :lol

Thanks for all the lovely compliments! My boything will be in town shortly for the weekend so I'll be quiet for a while but I'm sure I'll be back at it Monday. For now, here's a shot of the leg armor panels after aging and varnishing, just waiting to get peeled off the paper scale by scale and stuck to the pants. UGH. :unsure

Alrighty I MUST ask how you managed to make those lovely leg armor panels. They look perfect!

And do you have any idea how lucky you are with your natural hairline? Not only will I have to dye my hair black but find a way to make my smallish brow looker bigger too. Ugh.

As for the muzzle, yeah, Hiddleston does have very thin lips and this is a good way to deal with it.

 

[ARC]

Alrighty I MUST ask how you managed to make those lovely leg armor panels. They look perfect!

And do you have any idea how lucky you are with your natural hairline? Not only will I have to dye my hair black but find a way to make my smallish brow looker bigger too. Ugh.

As for the muzzle, yeah, Hiddleston does have very thin lips and this is a good way to deal with it.

I have to say this is the first time I've been thankful for my acres of forehead and weird masculine-sort-of hairline.

I've been experimenting with makeup techniques to disguise my comparatively big lips but I haven't found anything I love yet. I tried whiting them out with concealer and foundation and then just recoloring the inner edges with lipstick. The coloration looks decent but I still get weird shadows in photos, especially with flash. So back to the drawing board on that one. At least I'll have the muzzle to fall back on if nothing works.

The armor panels turned out surprisingly well for how easy they were to make. They were only time-consuming because of all the layers of stuff that had to dry. I decided how big I wanted them to be (I think mine are .5x.75 inches) and then drew out a grid on a piece of craft foam and cut them apart. The slant edge is about a 4:1 slope (I can make a graphic of this later if you're interested). I traced the shape of the panel where the armor goes onto a couple sheets of notebook paper and then traced it again upside down to have a mirror image. I stuck the little foam scales down on the paper with double stick tape so I could see exactly how they would line up and I cut partial pieces to fit at the ends of the rows as needed. Once they were all stuck down I sealed them with a mixture of about 1:1 white school glue and water (7 coats!). Next I put a dot of Tulip fabric paint (the sort of puffy type) on each corner of every scale to look like rivets. Once that was dry I put down a couple coats of metallic 'antique' gold acrylic paint. I went back in between the rows to make sure all the edges were painted (since the base foam was red and would look stupid showing through on the sides). After that I just dabbed a medium-sized brush in black acrylic paint, touched it to a bit of water and smeared it around some spots on the panel to look like tarnish. Then I blotted most of it up with a paper towel and repeated the painting and blotting until I liked it. I could have done a lot more aging, now that I've gone back and looked at my reference photos, since his armor is pretty badly discolored. The last step was a couple coats of Liquitex acrylic gloss varnish. Now I just have to peel them all up off the tape one at a time and stick them to the pants with super glue.

Haha, sorry that sort of turned into a novel.

 

[ARC]

So... I'm bored at my boyfriend's house while he does his physics homework and listens to Ke$ha so I'm about to start a pepakura Loki helmet. Ehehehehe!

Progress report to follow! It will probably go horribly! I've never done pep before!

 

[Risu]

From my experience, the two most important things to remember in pepakura are to ALWAYS use 110 lb. card stock, nothing lighter, and the always make sure the numbers on matching faces line up perfectly. If you do that, your model will turn out pretty much exactly as it should. Most warping comes from misaligned numbers. I've also learned from experience that if a fold line doesn't actually fold, if the original piece has more of a curve, don't crease the line. It saves you tons of time at the bondo stage.

 

[ARC]

Re: Avengers!Loki Build (crossplay!): Pep sizing question?

Progress on the pep helmet (not much)... It's slow but not overly difficult. I quit for the day when my glue stick started to get sort of dry so I moved to sticking armor scales onto my pants.

This particular pep was intended to be something to keep me occupied while boyfriend was doing other things, and as a learning experience, so I'm not going to cry about it BUT I feel like it might be coming out a little small. Has anyone used KaiserLee's Loki helmet file and if so, did you have to adjust the size?

And in general, what's the easiest way to go about determining how much to scale the file up or down? Now that I've gotten into it and seen how cool even a partial build looks, I really want to make this thing but I don't want to get through 3 or 4 helmets before I get the size right.

edit: Yes I was a derp and forgot to turn on edge ID so all my numbers are handwritten. I could have reprinted but I was using boyfriend's mom's printer and ink and paper so I didn't want to waste it just because I screwed up.

 

[Satxer]

Pants and tunic are coming along!

Tunic is lookin better than mine. I think I need to adjust mine a little. Is yours all sewn together as one, or is it like mine, where I have each panel overlapping eachother and velcroing?

Also, where did ya find the pep for the helm?

 

[ARC]

Tunic is lookin better than mine. I think I need to adjust mine a little. Is yours all sewn together as one, or is it like mine, where I have each panel overlapping eachother and velcroing?

Also, where did ya find the pep for the helm?

It's all one piece with a long zipper up the back. Sort of a 'Loki's sexy minidress'? Hehe. If you made all those woven straps functional, then my hat is off to you sir. My weave turned out a bit flat for my taste but I don't think it's bad enough to bother redoing.

The pep I was working on in the picture is this one but it's the helm from Thor. I scrapped it when I found this one (the Avengers version) but there are a lot of inaccuracies on that model so I'm not sure if I want to use it as a base and try to fix it up or just sculpt one or something. I'd like to pep it and build from there but I have no idea how to scale it to fit me. The usual scaling formulas are useless because the horns mess up the dimensions of the finished helmet. :facepalm

 

[ARC]

I will never understand why peeling these little things up and gluing them onto my pants takes so long. But UGH. It's terrible.

 

[ARC]

So I haven’t got the scales all the way up this side (and I haven’t even started the other side) but they’re far enough that the tunic covers the blank part so you can see what it will look like as part of the outfit. I’m really happy with with way the armor panels are turning out. I can’t believe how long it takes to pry the scales up off the paper, position them, and glue them down. I’m hoping to finish this side and do the whole other side tomorrow but that could easily take all day. I also want to do the chaps/boot covers tomorrow so I can have the whole lower half done…. but we’ll see if THAT even comes close to happening. The sleeves are high on the to-do list as well. Right now they're just pinned on so I don't lose them. The green is just a base structural layer and will only show in the correct places when finished.

 

[Satxer]

It's all one piece with a long zipper up the back. Sort of a 'Loki's sexy minidress'? Hehe. If you made all those woven straps functional, then my hat is off to you sir. My weave turned out a bit flat for my taste but I don't think it's bad enough to bother redoing.

To be honest, it's not as fun as it sounds. It works for what it is. And being I will probably only be wearing it for a couple of events, it may not even be worth changing.

As for the helmet. I got a Thor version from Yarko on the boards, and am just doing some extensive bondoing to change it to Avengers version. I've been kinda taking my time on that, as it isn't a priority. I don't look forward to the horn change.

 

[terrafovea]

Have I told you lately that you're awesome?? I'm now thinking my Loki costume I'm attempting should be for ME and not the boyfriend! >;-)

Thanks for sharing, please keep it up! I'll have a zillion questions once I get out of the sculpting and into the sewing. Ugh.