not so secret now that i'm posting it here, but in a way it still is. i've taken on the task of making a friend of mine into vaders secret apprentice. myself, along with several of my talented friends, have spent hours now looking at pics found online, as well as staring at the tv trying to get the camera angle just right to tell the details on the xbox demo. the armor itself has fallen to me to make (mostly because i'm that masochistic), and today i made some progress. enough talk, time to get to the pictures.
this is rob, my soon to be secret apprentice, also please note that he is wrapped in duct tape because we are making a duct tape mold of him.
next up, the mold of rob without him in it. this makes it handy for me to work with since i don't have to feed the manniquin and i'm pretty sure i'd have to feed rob if i kept him around to build the armor onto. i've started scribbling in where the armor will have to go.
after looking carefully at plenty of pics, these armor plates are not very big at all and shouldn't weigh too much even if i made them out of solid resin (though i'm not planning on doing that, the idea of working with resin frightens me like a thunderstorm).
the next step had me making a removable template from what i drew onto the manniquin. so i made the right armor plate out of plain old masking tape, then i peeled it off and put it on a piece of 12x18 sketch paper and traced it out.
after trying to fit the paper template back on i realized that i needed to cut the collar piece seperately.
i then transferred the paper templates onto a heavier poster/cardstock paper, got it to drape nicely with a little bit of mist from a spray bottle, taped everything into place, and this is where i'm at with the project right now because i'm too tired to keep working on it, but still awake enough to be able to post about it.
once everything is dried i'm going to carefully re-tape the two pieces together then coat it as light as possible with fiberglass resin, fill the low even it all out with bondo, then 'glass over it all agian with fg cloth instead of mat. i've never tried the cloth before, but it looks like it will give me a much better finish than using mat.
eventually i hope to figure out how to vac-form the piece, but i'll deal with that when i come to it.
this is rob, my soon to be secret apprentice, also please note that he is wrapped in duct tape because we are making a duct tape mold of him.
next up, the mold of rob without him in it. this makes it handy for me to work with since i don't have to feed the manniquin and i'm pretty sure i'd have to feed rob if i kept him around to build the armor onto. i've started scribbling in where the armor will have to go.
after looking carefully at plenty of pics, these armor plates are not very big at all and shouldn't weigh too much even if i made them out of solid resin (though i'm not planning on doing that, the idea of working with resin frightens me like a thunderstorm).
the next step had me making a removable template from what i drew onto the manniquin. so i made the right armor plate out of plain old masking tape, then i peeled it off and put it on a piece of 12x18 sketch paper and traced it out.
after trying to fit the paper template back on i realized that i needed to cut the collar piece seperately.
i then transferred the paper templates onto a heavier poster/cardstock paper, got it to drape nicely with a little bit of mist from a spray bottle, taped everything into place, and this is where i'm at with the project right now because i'm too tired to keep working on it, but still awake enough to be able to post about it.
once everything is dried i'm going to carefully re-tape the two pieces together then coat it as light as possible with fiberglass resin, fill the low even it all out with bondo, then 'glass over it all agian with fg cloth instead of mat. i've never tried the cloth before, but it looks like it will give me a much better finish than using mat.
eventually i hope to figure out how to vac-form the piece, but i'll deal with that when i come to it.