Re: Thorssoli Finally Decided to Start a Thor Costume
So I picked up a zipper-front wet-look catsuit from Amazon (
link) and handed it off to a seamstress friend of mine to remove the zipper and the sleeves. The plan is to make a frog closure for the one visible spot in the middle of the abdomen and then probably fit it with velcro at the top in order to keep it from being uncomfortable under the pressure of the chest armor. A few days after I gave it to her, she tells me that she decided to have her daughter try it on in order to see how it would look. Then she shows me the photos:
This poor kid. Then her little brother decided that the rubber toy hammer and the Viking helmet weren't enough to gauge the complete look. So they went ahead and made her a chestplate:
And finally, a cape:
Oh dear.
As it happens, this kid is a little skinnier than the woman who I'm building this to fit. So I figure it'll be just about perfect once all of the closures are added.
In other news, today I got started on the sculpt for the chest. Since I don't have a lifecast of my girlfriend's chest to work off of (note to self: lifecast girlfriend's chest) I've got to make do with an old duct tape dummy I pulled off of her a couple of years ago:
It's now covered in dust and was never a very good sculpting armature to begin with. Instead, I pulled out a copy of the chestplate from another old project:
Without all of the add-ons, the plain vacformed chest looks about like so:
Since I know it'll fit without any real modification, I went ahead and coated the inside of an untrimmed pull with release agent:
Then filled it with expanding urethane foam:
Once the foam had cured, I popped it out of the vacformed chest piece and started roughing out the new shape with a hand saw:
After an hour or so with the saw, body rasps, and sandpaper, I was pretty happy with the new shape:
Eyeballing it next to the duct-tape dummy, it looks like it ought to fit:
So I put a skim coat of Bondo over the whole thing and started smoothing it out. Here's about how it looks right now:
Now that I've started putting a shell over the top of the rough shape, it's only a matter of time before I've got the whole thing smoothed out. Somewhere along the way I'll be adding the collar ridges and extending the shoulders up an out in order to make a nice sturdy attachment point for the cape.
Stay tuned...