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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LostRebel" data-source="post: 1987577" data-attributes="member: 27963">I know I'm mixing two costume builds in one thread but that was more or less the way it was in real life too. Paint one, work on the other, etc. etc.For the lego costumes, I used foam core poster board to make the torso boxes. Four sides and and a top deck for the head to rest on. The "belly" is is the same material. It's a rectangular box but with the front edges of the side pieces protruding past the front edge in a semicircle to which thin poster card was glued to make the rounded belly. It's not really a belly, I think it is supposed to be the curved section of the leg joints. The legs were from large cardboard box scraps. The back and sides of each leg is a single piece, bent at the corners, and the front is a single piece, bent at the ankle and toe. The two pieces were joined with tacky glue and reinforced with sheetrock joint tape buttered in white glue! The basic heads were made from styrofoam and poster paper. I got a sheet of styrofoam insulation from the local home depot. It comes with a silver mylar coating on one side and a white coating on the other but peels off easily. This gives you a nice big sheet of foam that you can cut section from. The head has a neck/chin sectioni and a forehead/top-knob section that are then joined with a cylinder of poster paper. The mouth is window screen material. I had to excavate some of the foam behind the mouth and I lined it with black craft foam to black out the area.I tried making the hat and hair with expanding foam but I don't think that worked out so well. For one, it's _heavy_ and two, it's a pain to smooth, seal, and paint. I ended up scrapping the policemans cap and made one using the remaining sheet of styrofoam, just cutting sections, stacking, glueing, sanding to get the shape. This worked really well and resulted in a lightweight cap that comes on/off just like a real lego hat.  The hair piece remained a base of expanding foam but I ended up putting a paper mache cover to seal/smooth the shape so I could paint it. I then excavated as much of the foam from the inside to lighten it as much as possible, leaving the cardboard "ribs" I used as the skeleton for the foam work as the connection points to the head. If I did this again I would just do it with styrofoam, even though I hate working with the stuff. You feel like you are living in a snow globe with styrofoam dust floating all around you.For large cuts and coarse shaping I used my pistol solder gun as a hotwire tool. I bought some brass rod, bent it to a useful shape and fitted it to the gun. Hold the trigger long enough and it slices through the sheets of styrofoam like butter. Detail and smoothing was done with medium grit sandpaper in a sanding block or wrapped around various scraps of wood.The hands were made from a single huge block of foam I happened to have. I used a plunge hand saw to hack out the rough shape and sanded it smooth (or not as time was running out).  The wrists are pvc landscape drain connectors that I found at home depot, although my plan was to use the core tubes of duct tape rolls. Either would work fine. Carve a hole through the hand, glue in the tube, done.All the styrofoam pieces were sealed with washes of white glue. This helped smooth out the surfaces to get closer to the "injection molded plastic" look of real lego, but it is no substitute for good prep. Sand as smooth as possible before glue-painting, unless you have time to apply 50 coats. In the pieces that were well prepped, the resulting look is spot on.The arms  are just felt sleeves that I sewed. I then hot glued them to both the inside and the outside of the shoulder holes of the torso box. Gluing to the outside gave it the look of the snap-in arm on real mini-figs. Since the hands just slide on, I glued some velcro to the inside of each wrist and ran a length of elastic through the sleaves and behind the wearers back that attached to the velco. This allowed the wearer to "drop" their hands without them crashing to the ground in a shower of styrofoam! Similar to what you do with kids and snow gloves!All the pieces were painted and then gloss coated to give the plastic look. The torso patterns were masked out or made with stencils, but the faces were hand painted. The heads just rested on top of the torso decks. The fit was tight enough that they wouldn't fall off. I ended up fastening the torso and belly sections together so they could have been made in one piece, and the legs were attached with elastic and velcro to the belly section.  The wearers legs banged around in the leg boxes. I think I could improve the fit with some elastic cuffs suspended within but I doubt that would have been sufficient for their halloween candy dash requirements. So they posed in the legs and then ditched them. Since there isn't a lot of airflow in these heads, I wouldn't recommend them for warm weather and make sure you paint them well in advance as the paint fumes can be unpleasant. Make the mouth as big as you can to maximize the opening for both vision and airflow. Since vision and mobility are restricted in this costume, a handler is recommended!</blockquote>

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