G'raha Mia!

It’s time for more pandemic props with Mikey! We’re actually going to take a step away from Genshin this time (blasphemy, I know), to take a look at the first prop commission I actually got during lockdown: the glowing staff of G’raha Tia’s new digs in Final Fantasy XIV.

And of course I have mmore glowy bits to deal with. And with this one I had very limited wiggle room to hide a battery, because it’s just a long, skinny shaft. That was problem #1 to tackle, so I started with the crystal at the head of the staff. I will admit, the construction on this thing was super janky, but it worked XD

Unfortunately I didn’t do a great job taking photos of the steps I took (probably because I wanted to forget all of my egregious sins), but the basic process was thus:
1) Make an EVA foam crystal shape
2) Dremel in the contours & bevels
3) Heat pieces of worbla TranspArt (the clear worbla… which behaves very differently than regular worbla) over the foam shape
4) Cry in frustration
5) Repeat step 4, as black foam bits stick to the clear worbla as you remove it and then spend several hours trying to sand it out of there, to only moderate success [If I were to try this again, I would hopefully be smart enough to cover the foam with aluminum foil, so that this didn’t happen… and pray to the cosplay gods that the foil didn’t irreparably stick to the worbla itself.
6) Assemble the LED circuit that goes in the crystal (I used bright white LEDs for this, since the blue ones aren’t as bright and I had other ideas to achieve the color I wanted)
7) Sand the LEDs with a fine grit sandpaper to help with light diffusion
8) Wrap the lights in crinkled iridescent cellophane to add interest, fun color sheen, and further diffusion to the lights. Also this helped keep the LED’s in place on the inside of the crystal.
9) Cry some more as you try to attach the two halves of the crystal together unsuccessfully
10) Use spray adhesive to attach a layer of blue plastic grocery bag to the outside of each crystal shell half
11) Now try attaching the two halves again, with much greater success (they’re literally hot glued, btw… not a recommendation but it did work well enough because the heat made the edges of the worbla pliable enough to flex in helpful ways along the edges)
12) Cut away the excess plastic bag
13) Cry some more because you actually managed to cobble this #$%#@$# thing together

So, here’s the photos I do have!

That’s all for today! Hopefully the next one will have a wider array of in-progress photos so you can see what I did instead of read through my struggles. On the bright side, I have photos of this prop in action!

The delightful Nihohoho makes such a wonderful G’raha Tia! The costume is from Taobao.com and the photos were taken by BlizzardTerrak Photography.