Vroom Vroom (FFXV Engine Sword Tutorial)

Hey guys, welcome back! Today I'm going to be talking about how I made my FFXV engine sword! Lets star by taking a look at this absurd weapon.

So the fun thing with putting this together (besides all of the cool little details) was the relative lack of official references for it. So what I ended up using primarily was photos of props other people had made, to see what the details looked like. I primarily used this beautiful model, from someone who sadly no longer appears to be on deviantArt.

So, let's get down to business! It all started, as I'm sure you all know by now, with a pattern, which you can see here along with the pattern for the Rengar blades I was also working on.

I decided to make the base out of MDF (because I've been enjoying using that lately) and cut out the body, making notches on the end to fit a piece of PVC for the handle.

As you can see here, the PVC fits into the notches and holds itself in place. This makes for a much sturdier connection that simply gluing it on the end.

To solidify the connection with the handle, I plugged up the end of the PVC piece (the part where it attached to the blade) with kleenex bits, and sealed it with hot glue. Then I mixed up some liquid plastic, which I often use for casting, and poured it into the open end of the PVC pipe. The liquid plastic cures solid and strong, and prevents the PVC piece from wiggling around and falling apart.

To get the bevel on the blade, I used a dremel tool with a sanding bit. you can see the bevels in the next photo.

I'm sorry for not having a photo of an in-between  step, but here's the first round of details that were added. The red is a piece of craft foam, which I used a ball point pen to engrave the details. There's a lovely tutorial for how to do that here. As for the round pieces, the large round section is actually the cover for a CD stack, kind of like this. I got it at Big Lots for pretty cheap, and consequently I have a bunch of blank CDs floating around my craft foam now. I cut out the center, leaving about a 1-2cm ring around the outside. I also cut out the center circular part (where the spindle fits in). You can see it slightly better here (with a bunch of other details I'll get to momentarily).

For the smaller circular pieces, they're actually the plastic covers from plumber's seal tape, which you can find at Home Depot for about $.50 each, which is the only way I justified buying 6 rolls to myself... consequently I also had to travel to several Home Depots before I had enough because I wasn't about to spend $3 on the more expensive rolls with the same packaging when I wasn't even going to be using the tape. 

The mesh that I fit into both round structures is something I found at Home Depot as well. It's actually chunks of gutter guards, similar to these ones. I cut the corcular shapes out of the gutter guard, and glued them into the round plastic sections. It worked out really well because both the CD cover and the cover for the seal tape had a lip that I could easily glue in the gutter mesh. Once they were assembles, I glued on the main ones with E-6000. The rest we'll attach later, after we finish a few other details.

**A Note about attaching the CD covers: Because the PVC pipe extends into circular portion of the MDF base, I had to carve out a rounded section from the CD cover so that it fit over the PVC. I used my dremel for that, with the same sanding bit.

Now onto the other details. the three main details left to build are here:

For the red section, I cut the black part out of MDF, and used a small cardboard tube (I believe it was the center of a roll of something but I'm not sure what) and a plastic cap which I had in my stash of junk that just happened to fit perfectly over the end of the cardboard tube.

Next up we have the purple details. For those, I cut out several layers of cardboard for the base, added craft foam details for the ridges on the back, and glued on actual dimes for the little circular parts. I then covered the whole thing with a piece of worbla.

Here you can see the shapes a little better defines in the worbla. I generally use a Popsicle stick for pushing the worbla in to get the detail definition.

Lastly we have the yellow detail, which involved a lot of trial and error to get right. I knew I wanted it to light up, and thankfully I has a tiny keychain flashlight that would work well for the base, and let it light up the way I wanted it to. I had a clear plastic tube that as one point held little glass beads. It was the perfect size & shape, and it was transparent, so that was an easy call for the section that needed to glow. The hard part was figuring out what to fill the tube with such that it would glow blue. I tried mixing up resin and adding blue to it, but the dye never turned out looking right, and in once case the reaction was hot enough that the tube melted out of shape. Finalle I had a stroke of genius. I cut a section of hot glue stick, wrapped it with a section of blue plastic grocery bag, and shoved it into the tube. When I turned the light on it glowed exactly how I wanted it to. VICTORY AT LAST!!

The end cap was actually the cap of the bead tube, so that was easy, and I attached it all to the flashlight with E-600. As for attaching it to the sword itself, I carved out a little channel for it to sit in with my dremel, and then used contact cement to attach it. The reason I used that instead of E-6000 is because it was topheavy, so it would've been difficult to get it to stay in place while the glue dried. With contact cement, you paint a layer on each piece, and then press them together after about 15-20 minutes. It creates an instant bond so there was no worry about the topheaviness messing things up.

As you can see, we're almost done! That just leaves a few details to look at before we can start the sealing and painting process. First off are a few small details you can see in that last photo. Both of them were done with layers of craft foam. Here's a close-up:

As you can see, I've also attached the other round pieces made from the seal tape containers, as well as the other details I'd constructed. All attached with E-6000.

The last detail is a subtle one, but I'll point it out anyway. I added a little cap to the bottom section highlighted in the photo above. I hadn't attached it in that picture yet, but you can see it here:

From here, all that's left are the finishing stuff. I added a bunch of mod podge to everything, and then spray primed it all in black. The main reason I did that was because I wanted the inside of the pieces that had the mesh overlays to be black, which was way easier to spray than to try to shove a paintbrush through the little holes in the mesh.

**IMPORTANT NOTE** Make sure you cover the glowing part before you spray it! I just taped some plastic around it to protect the transparent section.

Here's some of the painting process! I base coated all of the silver parts with a medium grey before painting my metallics on. A few spots were a darker silver so they got gunmetal grey metallic paint instead of the sterling silver.

The last little details to be added were here, which I squeezed out metallic silver dimensional paint to get them.

And with that we have another finished prop, and another happy customer!

Thanks, Alex, for the fun commission, and thanks to all of you for stopping in!
If any of you guys are trying to make your own engine sword, I'd love to see it, especially if this was at all helpful with your construction :-D

Mikey Gets His Shit Together (maybe)

Hello my dahlings! Today's installment is probably not going to be the most exciting if you're just here to look at pretty photos of cosplay (but maybe if you stick around until the end you'll be rewarded).
Today, Mikey is here to tell you he's trying to overhaul his online presence. I know my posts on here have been super inconsistent because that's pretty much how my life works, but I'd like to work towards a more steady flow of content for all of my lovely followers out there, and feel some responsibility to do so purely for you guys, and also because I'm on that top cosplay blog list so I figure I should at least try to life up to that. Anyway, here's my general plan, I'll try to keep it simple.

• More consistent blog posts

Ok I know that sounds super obvious, but it's my step 1. I want to get better at posting more consistently so I'm trying to implement an actual posting schedule. At this point I'm optimistically hoping I can do at least one post a week. One of the ways I'm intending to do that is by having a regular rotation of posts that are not directly related to what I'm working on at the moment. Here's my general monthly schedule idea:

• Materials Monday: A new monthly post about a specific material I use a lot in my props and/or cosplay. I do have a page in my Help Desk which is specifically about materials here, but I thought it would be good to have some blog posts highlighting stuff I use all the time.
• Throwback Thursday: Those of you who've been around since the beginning remember when 3/4 of the content in this blog was me going through old costumes for TBT. Well, I want to bring this tradition back and hopefully I have enough cosplays I haven't already done a throwback post for to keep it going. You can hopefully expect this once a month, depending on how many old cosplays I even have stashed away.
• Fotoshoot Friday: Ok the "f" on the front there is pushing it, but the idea here is to motivate myself to actually wear my cosplays more frequently and do photoshoots with them. Given the time commitment and the necessity that my husband (or someone else willing to come be my photographer), this will likely be at most a monthly, but more likely a bi-monthly installment. This is probably the thing I'm looking forward to most in all of this :-D
• WIP Wednesdays: They won't always be on wednesdays, but to round out the weekly posts, I will be doing my best to post progress of my current projects more frequently than I do now because I'm really bad at that. Hopefully getting into this habit will also mean I get better at taking periodic progress photos too. Let's all keep our fingers crossed.
• Tutorial Tuesday: Don't worry, these won't generally be my tutorials. We all know how bad I am at explaining things most of the time, but if I don't have much else to post about I plan to highlight one of the useful tutorials I've used for my cosplays. And of course there's always the tutorials section on my Help Desk page.

• Site Updates

I'm hoping to get a lot more content on the site in general. Here's the general plan:

• Help Desk: I want to expand my help desk with more materials & tutorials for all of you out there who use my site to help them create their own awesome cosplays. Fortunately the "Inspiration" section is constantly growing as I find more awesome costume photos on pinterest, and the "Warm Fuzzies" section is just full of things to make you feel good. Mostly adorable animals.
• Mikey's Words of Wisdom: Ok, this sounds cheesy, but I wanted to put something simple and goofy on my main page that was also helpful. So when I occasionally have insights into things, I'll change the "Words of Wisdom" section. The first one is up now, so go take a look at my home page and see if you can find it. Follow the link in the title for more detail about said words of wisdom.

 

• Mikey Points

Ok, so I've toyed around with this idea for a little while, and I want to actually implement it for real. I want to have some sort of a reward system for people who visit my site/FB page.

• Earning MP: You'll have periodic opportunities to earn yourself some MP both here and on facebook. In order to earn your points, you may have to be the first person to answer a silly fandom trivia question, identify an obscure cosplay, or otherwise participate in activities related to my site.
• I'll keep a log of everyone who's collected MP, and how much they have. My intention is to put together a new page where all of that info is kept together, so that if you start to earn some points, you can actually see how many you have at any given time, without having to ask me.
• In order to qualify for earning MP, you need to be willing to give me a name of some sort that I can connect back to you, if you decide to redeem your points. It can be a screen name or your actual name, it makes no difference to me, it's simply something I can have displayed on the new page so we can all keep track of our points.
• If you'd like to redeem your points, you need to be willing to share your address, as most of the redeemable prizes will be physical objects that I'd send you. There may be digital prizes as well, in which case I would need an email. I will never give your information away, and I only need it in the event that you redeem your points for something.
• Prizes: You've waited long enough, let's talk about the prizes! Mostly it'll be things related to my etsy store. If you earn enough points you can get things like crocheted amigurumi, bow ties, or even gift certificates for my etsy shop! The new page I set up will have a section dedicated to redeemable prizes. Stay tuned for that.
• EARN YOSELF POINTS NOW!
  Since I'm implementing this new system, let's have our first giveaway now! Here's a little piece of fandom trivia for you to answer:

The first three people to correctly identify these two characters will win themselves 50 MP!

Since this is trivia, and publicly posting the correct answer will make it way too easy for the rest of the people trying to guess it, please send your answers using the "Contact Us" form on the site header.
Please include your name in your message, so I know who to give the points to!

That's all for now, thanks for stopping in, and good luck collecting your Mikey Points!

Colossal 2017

Hey everyone! I just got back from another awesome Colossalcon and my priority 1 is sharing my experience with all of you lovely people!
But of course I have minimal photos of my own cosplays because I'm a dummy and always forget to have people take photos of me on my own phone >_<

Nevertheless, here's how the weekend went!

Thursday I didn't even end up going, as I was still finishing up Jordan's Ruby cosplay (primarily painting the scythe), but I'm pretty sure if I had gone on Thursday I'd be even more exhausted. On the bright side, I got everything done pretty early and got to spend a relaxing evening with my husband and puppy.

I believe this is the third time I've gotten him to cosplay with me so we were both very excited.

Friday was a pretty easy day, I spent the day in Hestu and did lots of expand-a-banding people's inventory when they would ask for my photo. Went to a Voltron panel. Hung out with my friends. It was a good day.
I was also involved in a late-night RWBY panel as Yatsuhashi (in pajamas), which was interesting. I was tired and minimally involved since Yatsu is such an minor character so it was a struggle to stay awake but I made it through, and safely got back to my firend's house, which whom I was staying.

In anticipation of the panel, I made a basket full of Grimm. RAWR!

Saturday was a bit rough since I only slept for a couple hours, but I still had a lovely time with Jordan as our genderbent Ruby & Penny. We got lots of compliments and went to the RWBY shoot (after wandering around the waterpark for a good long while trying to find it).  Unfortunately, I'm an idiot and never made anyone I actually know take photos of the two of us, so hopefully I'll be able to find some one the internet and I'll share.

Also did a short stint in Hestu on Saturday for the Zelda shoot which was tons of fun and there were so many amazing cosplayers there. The BOTW game was strong. And I got to shoot my favorite thing from the whole weekend, which is pretty much the whole reason I wanted to make Hestu in the first place!

After the RWBY shoot Jordan & I went out to lunch with some friends and when I came back I put on Guy for a little bit, hoping to find the Rebecca cosplayer I'd seen as we were leaving. Fortunately, I found her almost immediately!

Sunday was pretty easy, hung around a while to say goodbye to friends, dressed in my magizoologist outfit since I brought it so I figured I might as well wear it at least once. Then came home to cuddle with my favorite boys.

All in all, it was exhausting but I had a lot of fun. With any luck, people will be posting photos over the next week or so, so I'll try and keep an eye out for things. And maybe someday I'll remember to get photos of my own cosplays on my own devices XD
If you want to see photos of all the other awesome cosplay I saw there, check you my facebook album HERE!