Re: Another Kingsguard Armor (Game of Thrones)
Continuing the detailing....
There are a few more engraved details to be made. On either side of the crown there is a design that is identical to the crown itself, split in half and rotated updside down. So once you've drawn the crown you're covered. A small portion of this design appears AGAIN at the very bottom of the armor, where it is raised instead of being engraved. There are also two little engraved curls at the bottom of the armor.
(Note: I believe the half-crown design appears yet again on a thin strip of metal that bridges the gap between this chest plate and the backplate, but i haven't found a good reference photo for it anywhere. I didn't make this piece in my costume.)
Here's a reference pic for the bottom of the armor:
Making these engraved details is a little trickier than the one up top since they are on curved portions of the armor. I routed what I could, but eventually i switched over to using a
linoleum cutter to carve it out (If you're not familiar with this tool, google it and it will be instantly obvious how it works). If you don't have or want to use a dremel, you could use the linoleum cutter for the whole armor, but it's not the easiest thing in the world. It takes a little bit of force to get it through the sintra.
Here's the extent of what i could cut with the dremel. A picture further down shows the finished cutting.
Next up, the crown. This is cut out of 2mm sintra. I think 3mm would be too thick, although if you don't wanna shell out for a piece of 2mm you'll probably do fine with 3. Because of the shape of the front of the armor, it's topologically impossible to make the crown from one piece of sintra. (Or at least way more difficult than is worth it) So an easy thing to do is make the two sides from one piece, and then just add on the little spike on top from a second piece.
First i want to show a picture that didn't work out. Here i cut a piece of sintra too closely around the shape of the final crown... then when i heated it to conform it to the armor shape, the dreaded SHRINKAGE caused it to be all wrong (hard to tell from the picture, but trust me). The sides of the crown curved inward making it much narrower than it should be:
Here's the version that actually worked. Notice how the sintra is MUCH bigger than the crown, so i could conform the sintra to the armor shape FIRST, then trace the crown onto it, and end up with a perfectly shaped crown.
The design was transferred to the crown same as before, then I cut out the crown and glued it on. To align it for gluing i traced the crown with chalk. I glued it on using pvc cement, which bonds great, but is very hard to work precisely with. This is why this is the ONLY place on the armor that i used pvc cement. (Potential alternative if you don't wanna pay for pvc cement: Use a soldering iron to poke holes through the back of the armor into the underside of the crown (being careful not to go all the way through) to make little spot welds).
To smooth out the transition from the armor to the crown, i eventually went back and "caulked" the edges of the crown with Apoxiesculpt.
The last thing i want to cover in this post is the technique for adding the shallower raised details, which appear here, on the legs, and extensively on the shoulders. The technique i came up with is mostly motivated by the fact that gluing on sintra is exceedingly difficult. So instead of glue: tape. Double sided masking tape (from McMaster). It's important that you use making tape because it has just the right thickness to let it really conform well... i think double sided scotch tape wouldn't really get down into the texture of the sintra.
The raised details themselves are cut out of chipboard (aka plain old thin cardboard). Although you might be tempted to use plastic or craft foam, i think the chipboard (combined with the tape) is just the right thickness, but more importantly, you can print directly on it (HUGE bonus when you get to the shoulders, which each have 80+ pieces to be added)
The procedure looks like this:
1) Make your design in illustrator or whatever.
IMPORTANT: Number each piece of it, since once they're all cut out they can be very nondescript and hard to tell which side is up.
2) Print your design on regular paper. Spray back with adhesive, let almost dry, and transfer the design onto the sintra like before, BUT this time instead of tracing exactly along the lines, trace a little bit inside the lines so that your tracing will get covered up by the piece of cardboard that you're about to add.
3) Print the design again on chipboard. Cover the entire back of the chipboard with double sided masking tape, leaving the wax paper on for now.
4) Cut out the design from the chipboard with a hobby knife. Here's where things get a little tricky. First off, double sided masking tape is like hell on hobby knife blades. I have managed to cut as little as 1" with a blade before the point breaks. I probably went through 20 blades to do all the cutting for this costume (and probably 30-50 more on other parts of the costume). Second (though less critical), chipboard is extremely fragile when it comes to peeling apart its layers. This doesn't cause many problems in practice, but probably at least once you'll accidently peel off the top of the chipboard and have to remake a piece (luckily each individual piece of these patterns is quite simple, so it's not like you lost a lot of work when this happens). So buy more chipboard than you'll need... you will need backups.
5) Now that the pieces are cut out, peel the wax paper off the back (carefully with the tip of a hobby knife blade) and just stick the piece in place on the armor (which you have marked in step (2).
One last step, and this one is super important: once it's all done, flood the pieces with thin CA. It will soak through the chipboard and even into the tape, and you will end up with a super hard, super durable design that is permanently bonded to the sintra. I have tried peeling pieces off, and really it can't be done without a LOT of work. So if you had reservations about cardboard + tape being fragile, fear not!
The CA also has a nice beveling effect that smooths out the transition from chipboard to sintra and gives it a less tacked-on look.
When you apply the CA, feather the edges with a cotton swab so that you aren't left with a ridge where it transitions down to bare sintra. But if you do get some ridges, they can easily be sanded off. Oh, and as a final step, I do recommend lightly sanding (by hand, not a power sander) over the dried CA, just to even out the tops a little and remove any bubbles or bumps.
Final Thoughts: I should note here that I think I made the crown a little too small. It's tempting to make it too big, so watch out for that... but i definitely wish I made it just a little larger. I also glued it on crooked :/ It's the kind of thing that in real life no one will notice, so it's not too bad, but if you examine it carefully you can definitely tell it's crooked. It happened because when i was gluing it on, i was focused only on the center line of the crown and trying to get that perfectly vertical. But a much better guide is to look at the two peaks on the sides of the crown... these are further from the center so it's easier to notice an incorrect angle (longer "moment arm" or whatever). So keep an eye out for that...