WIP Wednesday

Hey everyone! I've been busy working on commissions and trying not to get too sidetracked by personal projects and vidya games (I've only had moderate success in that respect) but even so I've made some good progress on stuff so I wanted to share.

First up is my most recently finished commission!

This is the Zweihander from Dark Souls. This photo might not properly show how big this thing is, so here's a child for context.

Photo courtesy of ashenonecosplay

So yeah, it's 5' tall and it was a pain in the ass to ship. But fortunately one of my worbla boxes was tall enough to wrap almost the whole thing, with an extra box to fill the gap.

This guy is made entirely of MDF, so it's nice and sturdy, which was important given the length and width of the blade (it does get a little droopy if you hold it with the flat part of the blade parallel to the floor). There's also a few small details made from cardstock and worbla.

As you can see, the sword is so long I couldn't make the whole thing in a single piece of MDF. Fortunately the split is in the hilt portion, so there's no worry of having a weak point because it's sandwiched between two other solid pieces of MDF.

This was a pretty straightforward prop since there's not a ton of intricate detail, the only cumbersome part is it's size... which just meant I had to spend about 4 days sanding the damn thing.

But once that part was done, it was a quick two days to get the whole thing sealed and painted! I'm super  happy with how this one turned out, and I'm loving the MDF for projects like this, it just work so well for blades! I'm going to be making Mordred's Clarent Blood Arthur for Colossalcon and I'm pretty much making it the exact same way. There's a bit more detail on that one so there will be more craft foam and/or compressed paper board to use but it'll be a comparable build (thankfully it's not 5' long like this one).

The other big project I've been working on is Xander's armor from FE Fates. It's been a project long in the works, if any of you even remember when I made Seigfried (hint: it was in 2016), that's when this project was initiated, but it wasn't until the beginning of this year that I actually started working on the armor. Things have come together pretty quickly, which is good because I need to get it finished and shipped off soon!

I'm building it the same was as I did with Leo's armor, and most of the other armor pieces/sets I've done. The base is craft foam and/or cardstock, and then craft foam and EVA foam for the raised details. Wrap all of that in a layer of worbla and you have your armor section!

At this point, all of the pieces are built and sealed, so all that's left is a few days of painting and some strapping and it'll be ready to go! I'll definitely be posting more photos once things are painted and put together, though you won't see the full suit put together until my client actually wears it nice my dress form is not sized right so I'm going to have them piece it together and get the velcro placed so it actually fits well.

Well, that's all for now, time to get back to painting!