Pandemic Props!

Well well, here we are again. To anyone who’s actually here seeing this, I’m delighted to have you back and also, it’s been a frankly embarrassingly long time since I’ve posted anything on here. I do plan to slowly add more to my cryptozoological field guide as I get new creatures assembled, but it will definitely no longer be a weekly endeavor; I do plan to keep to the Monday postings though so things will at least be consistent and mesh with my Instagram. In the meantime, however, I’m going to try to breathe at least some life back into my site here, which has gone untended long enough to probably be considered an archaeology project that this point lmao.
I hope all of you out there have been staying safe and healthy as the pandemic drags on. Blessedly Jordan and I have managed to avoid Covid thus far, and are very thankful that no one in our families has had any major complications with it.

Obviously with all that’s been going on, I haven’t been to any cons for the last couple of years, and consequently have done minimal cosplays, but as the slow start to more “normal” activity has been moving, I have had a few prop commissions that I’d love to share with everyone! So my plan is to post about a prop a week until I’ve made it through my backlog, and we’re going to start with a massive sword I made for my awesome friend HeckinSleepy!

Of the several commissions I’ve gotten since the pandemic began, Genshin has given me the most revenue. I can’t say I’m surprised given the game’s popularity, and how fantastic all of the designs are; I’m just amazed that I never fell into the trap lol. I did play some after getting several commission requests and thirsting over a lot of the designs and potential for fun cosplays to do but fortunately I had enough other stuff to distract me from getting in too deep. Anyway, one of the first Genshin props on my list was what turned out to be one of the largest swords I’ve ever made!

As with many of the Genshin stuff I’ve done, I was immediately filled with excitement to make something so impressive. That feeling was almost immediately replaced by dread and frustration as I tried to work out (1) what I was going to make it out of so as not to me insanely heavy, (2) the realization that I was going to have to light parts of it, and (3) the request that it separate somehow so that it would be easier to transport.

Because all of these things were intertwined, I had to think about them in tandem and work with HeckinSleepy to come pup with options he would be happy with. In the end, we decided the split made the most sense here:

Having the sword come apart at the base of the blade seemed like the best option for stability and functionality, and the design of the sword haad some built-in things that would help keep things together. It also meant that we could only light parts in the hilt, or else we’d need a second battery pack to power any of the bits in the blade itself, which we ultimately decided wasn’t worth the effort it would take to do that.

For materials, weight and stability were once again my primary concern; I knew using MDF for the base of the hilt was a no-brainer, but for the blade itself I ended up using large sheets of thick EVA foam (.25” I think….) so that it would be relatively lightweight and flexible enough to make joining and separating the pieces easier.

The only trouble with using EVA foam for the blade is that it needs structural support to not get floppy. So, first steps after cutting out the blade pieces were to dremel out a space for dowell rods and then glue the pieces together!

So, first things first, I made at least one mistake here: I didn’t put the reinforcing dowels all the way down toward the end, so it was still floppier than I wanted it to be, and in a rather crucial place! Later this would be reinforced by how the hilt pieces grip the blade section, but it was still concerning. My janky solution, because I didn’t want to have to pull the foam completely apart and potentially destroy it and need to start over altogether, was to take a metal ruler and shove it into the base so that it would help reinforce that section. Sadly I didn’t take a photo of that part because I was attempting to hide my sins, but the weird-ass improvisation runs strong in me XD
Now, if you look toward the base of the blade pieces, you might notice some additional channels there too. Those are going to help hold the blade in place when we stick it on the hilt.

And speaking of janky…

The rods that slide into those channels are absolutely some old wooden pencils I had lying around my craft room. It’s weird but they were the perfect size and shape for what I needed.
[This is why I never throw anything away, and consequently why I have entirely too much random shit in my craft room lmao]

As you can see there, we also have the MDF base for the sword hilt. I normally use .25” MDF for my swords and things, but this is .5” MDF. I went with the thicker stuff for several reasons: (1) the thickness of the blade meant the hilt would also need to be thicker than usual, (2) the thicker MDF is a lot sturdier, and heavier, so it counterbalances the weight of the blade better, and (3) I had a lot of other things I had to cram into/around the hilt base so the extra stability was key. They include channels for the wiring, a space for the battery (both of which you can see carved out in the photo), and the shafts for attaching the blade.

From this point, the hilt construction went more or less as-usual, with most of the details being added in as layers of foam sheeting, and eventually being dremeled into the proper bevels. I did, however, have to cast the translucent pieces where the lights were going.

The most relevant part in terms of the hilt construction is here, where the side details on the blade are actually a part of the hilt, and are what the blade section slides into. This keeps the blade stable by having points of contact on the inside of the blade (with the pencil shafts) as well as on the outside of the blade above and below. This isn’t foolproof and I still ended up adding industrial strength velcro to keep it from wiggling around too much, but it worked fairly well all things considered.

The details on the flat of the blade are actually slightly raised… mostly because I don’t trust myself to freehand a straight line, much less the 6 thin, parallel straight lines that run the length of the blade. I used a sheet of poster board, which I transferred the pattern to and then cut out with a craft knife. Also, as youo can see in the photo below, the side sections of the hilt which I described above were covered in a layer of warbla to make them rigid, since the foam on its own was not going to do that.

The well for the battery sits underneath the top grey portion, and so the separate piece that is sitting next to the hilt is the part that is removable to reach the battery. I unfortunately can’t find a photo of the battery housing from the other side such that you can actually see how it goes on, but it fits nicely over the red half-orb on the other side.
With all of the structural stuff done and tested, all that’s left was priming and painting (which you can already see starting to happen on some parts of the sword). The biggest pain in my ass was making a steady gradient from red to black… repeatedly. The gradient moves one direction up the base of the blade, and then the opposite direction on all those parallel lines I complained about earlier, which is yet another reason why I sure as heck wasn’t going to be freehanding those!

Despite being truly a beast of a project, I am insanely pleased with how this turned out, especially given the extra difficulties I had to incorporate (i.e. the lights and removable section). Here’s the finished sword in all its glory!

Since we skipped lighting any of the blade, I wanted to at least do something with the day-glow orange veins so I used neon paint such that they’d glow under UV/black light.

If you’re not already following HeckinSleepy, you totally should cause he’s an awesome dude. Also because he has a lot of props I’ve made so you’ll be able to see some of them out in the wild, and in the actual context of some beautiful cosplays!

Mod Podge holds my life together

I mean this in about as literal a sense as possible, Mod Podge is probably the most important component to a lot of my props because it holds everything together. And this WIP Wednesday you'll get to see how that all comes together.

So as you probably remember from last week, I've been working on a number of projects and guess what: not much has changed on that front. I've actually finished another of the props I've been working on and made some slow progress on others, just in time to pick up a few new orders, all while trying not to forget that I have a convention I'm attending myself in a little over 2 weeks that I have done tragically little to get my new Tsume cosplay ready besides making some simple little earrings and styling his wig. Though to be fair, the wig did turn out awesome, most of you have probably seen the wig test photo on facebook.

Ok, I guess I have his sunglasses ready too.

So yeah,  things are as crazy as ever, but that's just the way it goes. So while I will get to my new projects at some point in this post, I wanted to start with that pair of swords I've been working on, because I've finally finished one of them!

The second one is still in progress, but I've gotten to the point where I can start painting it. This one, however, was a bit simpler of a build because there's wasn't as much in the way of intricate designs and thick raised parts where I had to create a bunch of extra layers in foamcore to get it built.

Here's the beginnings of the sword, bevelled the same way I did with those kunai from about a month ago. To bring Mod-podge into it, as the title suggests, I usually use mod podge as the glue that holds the layers of foamcore together, cause I can take a thick paintbrush and paint a layer on before slapping the layers together. As you can see from the above picture, sometimes the edges don't fuse perfectly so you have to take another, smaller paintbrush and squish some more mod podge between the layers, then clamp them together like I have done in several places here.

 The guard, which you can't see in this photo, is also made from a couple of layers of foamcore with a rectangle cut out of the middle so it can slide down the blade to the base of the hilt. It should be noted that after filling in the raw foam edges with spackle and sanding them smooth, I always coat everything with a few coats of Mod Podge (to bring that back around), to essentially solidify everything into a single thing. It also helps smooth things out further, which a lot of people use gesso for, and I also use a few layers of gesso to that same end, but ultimately I kinda like mod podge better in general for smoothing things out cause I feel like it takes fewer coats but maybe that's just the delusion in my mind because I've been using it for longer.

Sorry for the shitty photo quality here, I thought it was clearer than that.

Here comes my exciting foray into new territory: Worbla! As most of you are aware, I've not used worbla for anything before but since it seemed a very versatile and common material to be used in cosplay, I decided to give it a try.

I was not disappointed. Now i admit, if I were using it to construct an entire suit of armor (as I'll be doing at some point in the not-too-distant future) for my first project, I likely would have had a much longer list of frustrations, but as I was just using it for some details on this sword, I'm pumped about continuing to incorporate this lovely thermoplastic into my projects. You can see all of the sandy brown parts in the photo above were done in worbla. It's super easy to work with, all you need is a heat gun, some scissors, and a pattern. I drafted up all of the pieces with cardstock so I could cut the cardstock out symmetrically to get my pattern even, then you just trace it onto the worbla and cut! The worbla even adheres itself to the other materials once you heat it up and bends pretty effortlessly around any type of curves you're doing. You can even heat up small scraps and squish them into the other pieces to make a pretty seamless transtion.

I even managed to add a line directly into the worbla on the pieces above the guard by just heating it up and pressing a sewing needle into it around the blade part.

You can see it in this picture a little better. I did use black to highlight the divot in the worbla, but it's actually in there too.

Despite the worbla adhering to itself, as well as the foamcore, I still coated everything with a couple more coats of mod podge before I painted the sword just to once again solidify everything. As my first attempt using worbla I didn't want to take any chances. The mod podge also helped smooth out the texture of the worbla a bit which was good.

Then it was off to painting land! I used a grey spray primer for the base coat, then sprayed the gold onto the hilt. Remember, spraying your metallics will say you hours worth of time! The rest was brushed on and I went back over things with a mostly dry brush and some black paint to highlight all of the contours in the designs.

Once the painting was all done, it's time for: you guessed it, more Mod Podge! I always put a top coat of Mod Podge on my props to help protect the paint. Flat paint can easily get scratched and wear quickly if you don't have some sort of protective layer over it. This also gives it a uniform finish so there's not that awkward point at which you shift the sword in the light and it goes from the super-shiny metallic gold straight to the entirely flat black areas. That would look really wierd.

And that's that! Now I get to play with this new guy for the next week or so while I finish its counterpart :-D

Now, a quick jaunt through my other projects...

The blunderbuss is finally moving forward again after a brief hiatus now that the darker iron metallic paint I ordered finally came in. Once this guy is dry I can start painting the rest!

The second sword I'm working on is in the painting stages too!

This looks like a bit of a hot mess right now, but it's the start to Morrigan's staff. I still need the majority of the staff body since the branch I initially intended to use was way too skinny and didn't look right, but I found a better one so I'll have more photos of the progress on this project up soon!

This is my newest commission, the silver disc that Static Shock rides around on. It should be a pretty simple one, but should be fun to continue working on nonetheless.