Thor Movie Costume

[LordMephisto777]

It's moving along again. I took a break and was working on a project for a friend's Xmas gift. I'm pepping the armor (not a good idea, I might add, SO MANY small pieces) but I'm making slow progress. If you don't mind I can send you a link to check it out. I would love some creative criticism. I have not found any reference for the back if his armor. The cape is always in the way. I think I may use an action figure for reference or just wing it. Also if you don't mind me asking the "under armor" that you are building layers on top of how did you make that?


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[bananahammock]

Yeah please do, are you not updating your thread on here? next chance i get i'll try to find that shot of Thor's back.

What do you mean by the under armour? I chopped out different levels of the armour pieces based on my design up top and glued them down overlapping where it looked about right. I should have taken a photo of the different pieces - they're all glued together now

 

[LordMephisto777]

That's the thread. I'm guessing you found it. I do update it but I haven't updated it since I started pepping the armor. I'm sure everyone here know the pepping process lol.

By "underarmor" I mean the base of it.

This part.


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[bananahammock]

Ah I see what you mean, I just mocked up a front, back and a shoulder piece out of card until it felt about right on the mannequin and used these as templates for cutting out the foam
This was the shoulder piece

This was the back piece based on a waistcoat size and shape

the front was the outline of my design up top. they all needed refining once I got them on the mannequin, I've chopped out another half inch of so of the armpit and more off the "pec" of the shoulder as that was too low and had to chop a curved strip out of the back as it stuck out and didn't follow the curve of my back. As i said I might chop down some of the width of the shoulder piece too.

The top of the back piece was hot glued under the back of the shoulder piece and the sides of the front piece had velcro hot glued to join them onto the back

 

[bananahammock]

As I said i'm cheating a little on fidelity of the costume as i'm not a huge fan of the design of the Thor movie gauntlets and they looked too fiddly to do, so whilst the rest of the costume is from Thor, i'm building the gauntlets from The Avengers. Printed and chopped out the design as well as straps. Made the under-gauntlet by eye.

I originally planned to have a velcro strap or two to hold the gauntlets on, but while testing the under-gauntlets realised I could almost fit my hand through when it was stuck together. I then hot glued some shearing elastic i had lying around on the thin end and glued the wide end.

This means the whole gauntlet can be glued down in one and slipped on over the armour sleeves. made sure I'd have enough room at the wide end to go over the scales hopefully. I may redo these if I have time when I get the cloak fabric to make it more "foldy", but I was just trying to get these done last night with a little bit of red fabric I had already.

I spray painted the armour scales last night and finished PVA-ing the chest armour so I just have to stitch the undershirt a bit tighter then I can start gluing the scales on (hopefully tuesday night)

 

[LordMephisto777]

I like the idea of covering the under-gauntlet in cloth. I never thought of that. Awesome. I updated my thread with a **** of the armor. If you want to take a look.


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[bananahammock]

I took a bit of a risk buying my cloak fabric online because I hadn't found exactly what I wanted locally. I saw an interview with the costume designer on Thor who said they used English Wool, dyed repeatedly for the cloak, which made sense as I wanted something thick and heavy that wouldn't be transluscent. I found an ebay seller selling Red Cashmere wool for £5 a metre and it looked like exactly what I was looking for, so I bought 3 metres and it seems perfect for the cloak. Here's how I am afffxing it to the costume

I had some 2mm aluminium stips which I cut to size, bent in half and secured the sides with thin strong garden wire. I was worried the aluminium would snap as it made cracking sounds as I bent it, but it stayed together fine.

cut, filed and bent a longer length of aluminium that will slot into this

and stick onto the Shoulder piece under the armour

duplicated on the other side

Secured a cut piece of the 12mm foam underneath and tapered it at the slot end

and did the same for the other side.

I'm planning on folding the fabric underneath the foam piece like this

and creating folds on the top side like in the film

here's how it would look

Once both sides are attached the weight of the cloak should pull the centre down and flare out the shoulder pads. I orignally planned on having the piece of the foam above and below the metal strip, but I decided i couldn't be bothered, until I laid it over and found the metal wanted to poke through the fabric, so to prevent any tearing and actually look more Movie acccurate I added another foam piece on top and sanded all the edges to make them all rounded

The cloak is really heavy, so it wants to pull down at the back, which pulls up the bottom of the shoulder piece, so I may make a further strip support to go all the way down my front or a support behind/on top of my shoulders or a combination of both. I may have to unbend the metal a touch, so that the weight creates it's own bend to the right degree. The fabric really does look and feel perfect, some of the pictures make it look a bit pink, but this is not the case, it's about as close to the movie as you'd get without dyeing, which is extremely fortunate

I also sprayed my armour and gauntlets bits, so i'll be putting them together soon - its all coming together! I'm also in the middle of sewing my undershirt more skintight and planning to stick on the scales tomorrow, so we'll soon see if that experiment is going to work - haven't got a backup plan, so im a bit screwed if it doesn't!

 

[TrioxinKustoms]

very impressive.. The foam work is amazing.

 

[Bradleyw]

This is looking amazing, if you dont mind i will be borrowing your ideas as hopefully i will have my own thor build. But have to say this is looking awesome. keep it up

 

[Dynofiend]

The pleats in the cloak look great. I might also suggest bunching up the fabric in the centre to create the lazy loops of fabric you see in the upper back area. Hard to describe but you can see what I mean from this picture.

http://www.mwctoys.com/images/review_htthor_1.jpg

The weight of the cloak wont do this on its own. You need to take hold of two points on the back of the cloak, say about 6 inches from the top, and a little wider than the width that you want the loops to be, then drag those points upwards and inwards to meet the top of the cloak, and affix them there (sew or glue). Repeat this going down the back of the cloak at each point where you want an extra loop, getting the points, and dragging them up about six inches and fixing them there. You can use pins to do it temporarily to see if its coming out OK. I only did one on mine at the top. Note that doing this reduces the overall length of the cloak each time you create a loop. It might also mean that the cloak needs to be made without a square base to it, perhaps more of a semi circle, to account for the extra fabric needed in the centre.

When you create the pleats you can use the innermost pleat to hide the points you dragged up which are now sewn or glued.

 

[bananahammock]

Thanks for the advice dude, i'll definitely give that a bash when i finalise the cloak - found this image of the cloak showing the effect more clearly

finished the gauntlets a couple of days ago, used a hot air gun to mould the black mid-gauntlet to the under-gauntlet, used some cut offs of the cloak fabric to add folds to the under-gauntlet and cut halfway through straps and mid-gauntlet so they could be glued flat-ish

finished gauntlet with my hammer

added spare rucksack clip i had to belt

Then last night got round to glueing the sleeves onto skintight sports top
numero uno:

first two lines

half the sleeve (about an hour) - took a break to eat a sandwich

finished right sleeve (mostly filled in gap on inside of sleeve after photo)

looks good and moves pretty well, bunches up obviously as expected when arm bent more than this

all together:

Thor rage face!

only thing is that movement of the arm makes the foam scales bunch up and flake off some of the paint. anyone have any advice about what to coat the paint in to kind of 'seal' it in. will try PVA at next opportunity

 

[LordMephisto777]

The sleeves look awesome. Well everything looks awesome. I will be stealing your sleeve idea for sure now. I had a feeling breaking up the "scales" would look the best, and you confirmed it.


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[EyeofSauron]

i think i said it before, but latex it will also prevent the edges pulling up

2 coats of latex should work fine

 

[seancoleman]

love all the detail

that sleeve is awesome

 

[Graphic Jordan]

Dude. This. Is. Amazing!

 

[bananahammock]

Thanks for the encouragement chaps and glad you like my ideas. Eye of sauron - latex would help keep everything together but I am apprehensive about the arms not being able to breathe - just wearing the gauntlet for a few minutes on bare skin got a bit sweaty. Also I'm not sure I'll find the right kind of latex cheap enough . What I should have done is mix some metallic paint with pva when I was coating the scales but I'll try coating pva on top of the paint to see if that helps. If I have time I'd like to do some dry brushing with black paint and maybe a wash over the top to bring out muscular highlights a bit, but running out of days and I still have to finish the belt , do the shins as well as the whole other sleeve. Got a lot of Christmas related things on over the next week and a half.

Lord mephisto and anyone else considering this approach be warned it is very time intensive. It took about 2 hours to mark , chop out and blu tack down the scales , about half an hour per coat of pva with a day between for drying. I did 3 coats. The sticking them down (I glued each of the 4 corners of each scale so that the fabric can move and breathe underneath) took about 3 and a half hours. And this is per sleeve .... dreading attempting to find the time to finish. I'd also suggest getting grey or black foam so any gaps in the paint aren't an issue. I used blue foam as I just had it by chance and if I can't stop the flaking , by the end of the night it might look a bit ****ty. Good luck though , but I encourage yo to try to find a more efficient way !

Apologies for bad spelling or grammar am writing this on my phone on the train.

Edit : and still have to finish the discs and make the collar so that it attaches to the armour and finish the cloak argh no time no time !

 

[EyeofSauron]

pva glue will do the same thing as latex, namely sealing the whole thing, so the breathing thing is there either way. the only difference is, that pva is not flexible enough for the arm movements and will break.

 

[bananahammock]

sorry for the lack of updates fellas, as I thought the last week and a half has left absolutely no time for anything except christmas related things and any spare moment building the costume instead of documenting it, so there's a bit of a lack of photos on the last few stages.

I mocked up an image of how I thought the shin guards would unwrap and cut this out of paper to test the size because I was running out of foam and couldn't afford to get it wrong

made a few adjustments and cut the foam, stuck a strip of vecro down the front and to join the metal shin plate in the right place and glued some bits of the cape material in the right places on the calf. I don't seem to have a picture of the finished leg, but you'll see it in the final photos.

I had planned to spend the night before New years eve to pretty much finish the costume and then have the day itself to leisurely do any last minute details, however a car breakdown and double flat puncture saw off that plan and I had to rush to get finished in the last couple of hours before the party.
I really wanted to add the collar and have it attach to the armour at the front so i cut a strip like this and glued it onto the shoulder piece and had a small velcro patch to connect it to the armour

I also glued in 2 rucksack clips to join the top of the armour to the shoulder as the weight of the cape pulled the velcro apart and also meant I could take off the body length aluminum strips which were a bit of a hazard

The discs at the front were pretty much at the last minute and the design drawn on with a compas and a template. The latex idea was not the best solution for these, i'd either use the halloween ball and chain idea or buy the cheap fancy dress costume and take the discs off that were I to do it again.
here's the finished tunic

 

[bananahammock]

So here it is - the final result! I had to take a few shortcuts due to running out of time, but overall I was really happy with how accurate to the movie I made it. Everything fit well and was relatively comfortable

because it was so last minute at the end, I was suiting up as my lift arrived and I didn't manage to get many pictures which was a shame. I would have loved to get some action poses in some better lighting, as the camera flash isn't too kind to the foam and makes it look lighter and bluer than it looks in reality

although it was a bit warm in me leather trousers and layers of foam I didn't get too uncomfortably hot all evening, my brother wearing his dressing gown got far more hot

my fine lady in her fantastic Fay Wray outfit

I may or may not have been a little squiffy at the end of the night - that was my tankard on the table I brought with me to drink from - it seemed appropriate

but I won the costume competiton!

thanks for all the encouragement and appreciation chaps, hopefully some of you planning Thor outfits can use some of these ideas here's some final thoughts:

I was pleased with how the armoured sleeves looked, but they were a serious amount of work to realise. I estimate each sleeve is about 8-9 hours solid work in total and they do get worn out, especially in the elbows and armpits. my second sleeve survived much better as I had learned some lessons from doing the first one.
I cut the pieces out, blu tacked them all individually on newspaper, then coated in PVA and sprayed with aluminium spray paint while the glue was still wet. did two coats of that and then a final coat of PVA to lock in the paint. It made each piece much more flexible without breaking off the paint, but some bits still got worn away.

I ran out of the car paint when doing the shins and discs and had to hunt around for some more spray paint, so I found some silver/chrome art spray paint, which was much more chrom-y and flexible, but I couldn't coat it in PVA as it seemed to be hydrophobic or something. You could also, if wished, coat all the bits of black foam in PVA and black spray paint for a more Movie-real rubber/leather look, that would be more forgiving to flash photography, but that seemed like too much trouble to me, and it may get scruffy, which wouldn't look good

I'm hoping I'll get a chance to get the costume out again one day, although it needs an evenings work to fix it up. I've kept a load of spare armour pieces for replacements in the elbow and part of the side tore as I was bending down to clear up a smashed bottle my cape had knocked off the table! any questions let me know

 

[Peerino]

Looks really cool. I like it, although a littlle bit more colour would have been nice..