foam latex

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Queen of Blades tutorial Step Ten: shoes, attaching dreads

In this post I’m going to discuss the little things that didn’t really have enough content for a post in itself. One of these items are the heels of the shoes. The first thing I did for the feet after we cast the shoe covers in foam latex, is trim the excess foam off, and have Mario make the seams disappear- we’ll cover seaming shortly. Then, I glued the covers to the shoe using the same rubber cement we used to make the paint. After that, I grabbed some two part epoxy clay (we used Magic Sculpt) and sculpted out the heels.

Now, the Magic Sculpt didn’t take the rubber cement paint very well, so we had to paint them with acrylic paint. Continue reading →

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Queen of Blades tutorial Step Nine: Painting your pieces (for foam latex!)

For foam latex, there are many ways you can paint it, and each way has significantly different materials and its important to look at the positive and negatives of each method. I’ll list the ways you can paint it first, then detail the way we painted our suit. We decided to airbrush our body suit, due to the fact that paint brushes are poorly suited to the task, and using sponges would take way too long.

Materials to paint foam latex with:

RMG paint Continue reading →

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Queen of Blades tutorial Step Nine: Casting your pieces

Finally, after you’ve molded your parts, sculpted your pieces, and cast your molds, you can cast them in your material! We used foam latex, so that’s what this tutorial is for.

To bake foam latex, you need an oven that you do not cook food in, that will go as low as 160 degrees Fahrenheit. It must also be able to fit your molds into the oven, which is why we built a huge one, to fit our body mold in there. You also definitely need a scale that measures in grams.  Continue reading →

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Queen of Blades tutorial Step Seven: Molding the smaller pieces (or: how to make stone molds!)

Now, one of the things that was the least stressful for me, stone molds. The basics of making a mold (no undercuts, mold line, the dreaded clay wall…) are covered in the fiberglass mold tutorial, so check that out first, I’m just sticking to what makes a good stone mold in this.

As with the fiberglass molds, make sure there is a key in the stone part of the mold, to help line up the mold with the inner piece when you’re casting. Put a layer of clay covered with saran wrap under your sculpture so that the details aren’t ruined by laying on the table, and make sure to mark out your mold line with a sharpie. Continue reading →

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Queen of Blades tutorial Step Six: Molding the body suit

So I’ve already covered how to make a fiberglass mold, these are just tips about how we went about doing the body mold.

If you are making a body suit, or making a mold of something just as large, then have at LEAST one other person who knows what they’re doing with fiberglass working with you, but try to get more people to help. The more people who are making the mold, the quicker it will be done. Mario and I worked two 17 hour days, only stopping for quick meals, to get the body suit finished.

Make sure to have proper ventilation, and wear gloves and masks. If your suit has a lot of detail, it’s crucial to do a layer of gel coat. We used clear gel coat to help us see any air bubbles. I covered all of this in the previously mentioned post on molds. We had some issues with the gel coat sliding, thin layers are better than thick, trust in the material. It’s better to do two or three layers of thin gel coat, than one thick layer. Make sure to read the directions on the can for multiple coats, because it’s specific on timing.

Oh, another important note, when you clean out the clay from the body form, make sure to put it in a bucket, and measure it so that you know the amount of foam latex you’ll need for the suit. Also, work quickly but also take your time with laying the fiberglass, so that there aren’t any air bubbles, or messiness.

As always, let us know about any questions or concerns. Happy crafting!

 

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Queen of Blades tutorial Step Three: Resin arms with removable fingers

Now that you’ve made a mold of the stone hands (and if you’re having issues getting the stone out of the fiberglass mold, because we did, then we ended up having to chisel it out, and shatter and break the stone out of the hand) you can finally cast some arms with fingers that come out. If you’ve forgotten, the reason we need these for gloves is so that when we take the glove off of the arm after we’ve cast it in foam latex, the glove won’t tear with you taking it off, since the fingers will come off and you can then take the fingers out. If you used a stone hand to bake these in, then you have a very real possibility (I almost want to say 100%, but there may be someone out there who got lucky) that the fingers will snap when you  take the glove off, or even sooner, when you make the fiberglass mold of the glove sculpture.  Continue reading →

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How to: make a fiberglass mold! (also: clay walls and a quick tutorial for silicone molds!)

This tutorial is to go along with my Queen of Blades tutorial series, but can be used for any fiberglass molds! It also covers silicone molds really quickly, since you can use the same clay wall to make a silicone mold. I’ll cover stone molds next!

Continue reading →

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Queen of Blades Update: August 23

This has been a busy week for us. We never get as much done as I want to in a week, but something always happens to take up our time (Mario had duty, so he had to work on a Saturday), and I also tend to give us way too many things to get done in a week… but we’re still right on schedule.

The oven is finished, dimensions are 5 foot wide by 4 foot tall and 4 foot deep. That’s exactly enough to fit the body suit in there.

We also cleaned out the body molds (finally…) and dried them really well. I still need to get a tiny bit of clay out of one of the glove molds, but that shouldn’t take long at all.

Here’s the body core that will go inside the body molds… not exactly my size, it’s a bit larger, but we’ll be seaming and cutting down the body suit once we get it baked, and it will fit me perfectly.

We molded the hands for the gloves, we needed to do this because if we used the stone molds as they are, the gloves would have ripped from us trying to get them off of them, and the fingers would have broken off. We’re recasting in resin and will be making the thumb and last two fingers detachable to keep from ruining the gloves.

Please excuse the messy table, Mario was still working on painting a commission when I took this picture. The dreads are all sculpted, we have not had time to mold them yet, but I hope to soon.

Speaking of dreads, this is what the dreads will be attached to. This is a cowl that will be glued onto my face, and will support the weight of the dreads. I’m pretty proud of those ears; they were giving me issues before but I conquered them :)

We also got a ton of stuff in for baking the foam latex, but haven’t taken a picture of it all yet, so you guys can see it next week.

The plan for this next week is to start baking some molds! We’re drying them out right now in the oven, and Thursday or Friday we will be practicing with foam latex, to get the feel of it, then Saturday we’re having a bunch of people over to help us mold the big one- the body suit! I’m so excited to finally be able to put it on!