How to make a Loki costume part 7- Chest and wrist armour

I have a secret about sculpting.

…I hate clay.

I mean REALLY hate it.

I hate it so much that I avoid it as much as possible. It seems that clay and I will never get along, so much so that I avoid costumes that I know I’ll have to do any sculpting in clay for.

I have lived in envy of other people who find sculpting in clay *fun* and produce these beautiful finger print free pieces. I am not one of those people.

So here’s how I made the sculpts for the loki armour with the LEAST amount of clay work possible.

Remember the PVC foam board back in part 5?

Well, I realised from previous costumes that you could make indents in it, rather like leather carving. Also during this project I’d scoured the internet looking for how other people had replicated this costume. One of my favourite methods was leather carving, used by this etsy seller.

Here’s a comparison they give from the movie to their pieces:

But I wanted to be able to pop out lots more of these afterwards, so I decided to sculpt in PVC foamboard using leather tools and cast in silicone and resin.

Here’s the test piece for the wrist with all the tools I used. PVC foamboard is soft enough to take etchings from a biro pen. The cross hatching/crosses is made with a cross head screw driver : D

Here’s the mock up of the loki tunic with my scribblings on it. The chest plate sizing was carefully taken from here, transfered to PVC foamboard and lines added with a biro. I sanded the edges then BAM time to mould that sucker.

Same technique as part 5, just a weirder shaped mould! I’ve combined the wrist and chest pieces to save on silicone.

I pour some black resin into the resulting mould. Easy flow 120 is flexible after moulding and can even be heat moulded afterwards. I pull the cast out of the mould once it’s dry to touch and lay it over a mannequin to give it a rough chest shape.

It’s then sanded down, sprayed black, gold brushed with acrylic paint and sealed with a clear matt acrylic.

I cut the rest of the chest plate out of pva foam, which is like craft foam but a bit denser. Using spray adhesive I cover it with leather.

The top chest piece pinned to other WIP parts to test size.

Then the entire thing is glued onto more foam to keep it stable with the green fabric added where the slits are.

And yes, it was hard to stop rubbing this with my hands while saying ‘oooooooOOOooo’