For a long time now I've wanted to do a super villain costume. I prefer costumes with helmets / armor, so Doctor Doom was a great choice. He's also a generally awesome bad guy 
Originally I thought I would do the version from the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon since I've been watching and enjoying that...
I dug out some Chavant Le Beau Touche clay and an old face casting and started working on it. I got about this far:
When I realized that this just doesn't look like Doctor Doom to me. In context it would make sense, but just laying on a table it looked more like something out of 300 than the Doctor I knew as a kid.
A bunch of re-working and The Books of Doom version was born!
I pressed rivets into the clay then made a waste mold to get a resin copy to refine more:
Right out of the mold I knew I wasn't happy:
I extended the back edge of the mask with scrap sintra (seen in the last pic) then smoothed it with Smooth On's Free Form Air epoxy dough..
I also sanded off the rivets completely.
A bit more sanding and smoothing then I vacuum formed a test mask over the sculpt (this is why I like to use epoxy/resin masters vs. clay!)
Next was a re-work of the jaw and brow lines to better match the comic reference.
Once it was all smoothed out, I used a tip that I picked up from one of Volpin Prop's blog posts: Using scrapbooking stickers for rivets!
Another mold made, another cast pulled!
(not shown, 2 total fail castings! one was full of bubbles, the other a bad mix of resin that never got harder than rubber)
Casting this is a beast... avoiding bubbles in all those little rivets is annoying! I got the hang of it eventually though, so that's good
Next up: painting and working on the body armor (vacuum formed)
Here's the first small piece of armor:
Pink EPS foam sealed with Smooth On Epsilon epoxy. I'll sculpt the details on that with apoxie sculpt then vac form right over it. I'm only hoping to get a few suits out of it so I'm not worried about long term longevity.
Originally I thought I would do the version from the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon since I've been watching and enjoying that...
I dug out some Chavant Le Beau Touche clay and an old face casting and started working on it. I got about this far:
When I realized that this just doesn't look like Doctor Doom to me. In context it would make sense, but just laying on a table it looked more like something out of 300 than the Doctor I knew as a kid.
A bunch of re-working and The Books of Doom version was born!
I pressed rivets into the clay then made a waste mold to get a resin copy to refine more:
Right out of the mold I knew I wasn't happy:
- The cheeks are all wrong
- the mask doesn't go far enough back on my face
- the rivets are too big and too flat
I extended the back edge of the mask with scrap sintra (seen in the last pic) then smoothed it with Smooth On's Free Form Air epoxy dough..
I also sanded off the rivets completely.
A bit more sanding and smoothing then I vacuum formed a test mask over the sculpt (this is why I like to use epoxy/resin masters vs. clay!)
Next was a re-work of the jaw and brow lines to better match the comic reference.
Once it was all smoothed out, I used a tip that I picked up from one of Volpin Prop's blog posts: Using scrapbooking stickers for rivets!
Another mold made, another cast pulled!
(not shown, 2 total fail castings! one was full of bubbles, the other a bad mix of resin that never got harder than rubber)
Casting this is a beast... avoiding bubbles in all those little rivets is annoying! I got the hang of it eventually though, so that's good
Next up: painting and working on the body armor (vacuum formed)
Here's the first small piece of armor:
Pink EPS foam sealed with Smooth On Epsilon epoxy. I'll sculpt the details on that with apoxie sculpt then vac form right over it. I'm only hoping to get a few suits out of it so I'm not worried about long term longevity.
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