MH4U Eldaora's Taus Hunting Horn cosplay prop [part 7]

Hello blog readers and MonHun fans!

Here comes the seventh and final part of my huge Monster Hunter cosplay build project – I'm making a Hunting Horn called Eldaora's Taus from Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, one of my most played video games to this day. I've been a major fan of the franchise ever since I played Freedom Unite all those years ago and yeah, for the longest time I've dreamt about making a MonHun costume!

I am currently only making the weapon but I will, of course, make a complete armor set later and I think I have it planned which one it will be, hehe.
If you have no idea what I've made before this part you can check all previous progress posts here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Note: this project is split into several parts because otherwise it would turn into a kilometer post; I need to document my progress carefully (many photos etc) since it's a school project.

Let the final quest commence!

Adding black worbla to a horn.

So yeah, last time I ended the post with the coloring and weathering/shadowing of the Hunting Horn and what was left to do was to finish painting the head, horns and ears and to attach them. Before worrying about the whole "how the hell do I attach the protruding parts?" issue I decided to first do the worbla episode out of the way.
I had bought two rolls of black worbla for more than a year ago and now I got some use for it; I've barely worked with worbla before this (only done really small and/or easy details) so yeah, I'm a beginner when it comes to worbla. ^^" Frozen Angel helped me by providing an extra pair of hands when I applied the worbla onto the horns on 13th November. I noticed early on that the worbla, when heated, had a tendency to sink into the hollow spots of the chicken wire base under – this was not really a surprise in the sense that I knew that worbla is thin/flimsy by itself, but somehow I had counted on it to not sink in that much; it was as if the aluminium foil wrapping wasn't even there because the worbla just revealed the hexagon shapes of the wire net under, which created a bumpy-appearing texture on the horns. I must admit that I didn't like the bumpy and wrinkly look that it gave at first (I originally expected a smoother application) and was terribly disappointed with both the result and myself for not having had enough time and knowledge to make the base smoother.
I was looking at the horns with this disappointed face as I went on, thinking that I'm wasting expensive worbla as it's not turning out how I had hoped. But as I continued I remembered that the main body of the Hunting Horn is not smooth either and yeah, the imperfect horns would probably look alright on it – after they get painted and attached. After all, I went for a more realistic approach with a more battle-worn look and thankfully, because it's a Monster Hunter prop and not a perfectly sleek anime prop, it only makes sense that the thing looks like it has seen better days since it has been used to beat larger than life dragons into a pulp...

I finished covering both horns in worbla, which meant cutting out a lot of 5 cm wide strips and wrapping them so that they overlap each other. I worked myself from the tip down to the base of each horn. I also feel like mentioning that I got the impression that black worbla tears easier than the ordinary worbla (the brown one) when heat-shaped as I several times got it to rip when pressing seams to get them to disappear etc.

Next up was to cover the ears. Now I couldn't do the same approach and so I did a "pattern test" on a paper towel as that was what I had at hand in the garage. The pattern wasn't anything exact but just to give some kind of idea of what worbla shape I could work with.

Worbla pattern test for the ears.

The ears of course got wrinkly too (they had the same base under as the horns) but the wire net's hexagons didn't shine through as much as on the horns but, then again, the ears had a bit more foil to them and I didn't press in the worbla as carefully as on the horns (to avoid gaps in the overlapping "ridges"). At this point I didn't even care about the wrinkles and uneveness as much as I had started thinking that it just looked more natural or realistic somehow or at least that's what I tried to tell myself.

Worbla-covered ears.

Now with all the parts covered in worbla I came to the hard part, namely figuring out how exactly to attach them. At times I wondered why I did not do it much earlier but then I remembered that if the horns had been on already it would have been much harder to rotate the whole build for the painting process...

My stepdad came over to brainstorm and we ended up agreeing on that the safest, and probably only reasonable approach, was to cut out holes to sink the horns and ears into. It felt a bit barbarian to go in with a knife and cut up all that hard work but oh well, gotta do it to get the horns to stay on safely. Besides, now that the horns were wrapped in worbla they were also notably heavier and thus we had to make sure that the holes that got carved out were deep enough to lodge them securely in place.

Marked horn placement on the head.

It was important that the hole was carved at an angle (towards the face) and not just carved out straight downwards, if that makes sense. It's a bit hard to explain but the way the hole was carved would directly affect in what position the horns would stay up when sunk into the hole; I didn't want the horns to stand straight up but be curved backwards and thus the tilted angle was really important to achieve the proper placement.
While test-fitting the horns we noticed that we'd need to slim down the base of the horns (since the head itself is quite narrow) and so I reshaped the base by using a heat gun and pressing it together to be more of a wedge, with downward curved sides, instead of the original round-ish shape. I reshaped the base of the ears as well but only made them a bit smaller in diameter, while keeping the round shape.

Hole for the horns carved out and test-fitting.

Once I saw the horns test-fitted onto the whole thing I started to warm up to them, somewhat – their rugged, worn, irregular appearance started to look pretty cool in their own unique way.

I carved holes for the ears as well, although these I didn't have to angle as much as the horns and pretty much just carved straight downwards. I had to pay attention so that I didn't end up carving out the ear holes too close to the horns; there would need to be some mass between the horn and ear holes for support.

Hole for one ear carved out.

Test-fitting horns and ears together.

The placement of the horns and ears seemed fine (thank God, it would have been horrible to make a mistake at this point!) and so I continued by spray priming the separate parts. Because it's basically winter here by now it's not really good, nor recommended, to spray outside because of the cold – this of course is a bit of a problem since I can't control the weather and I needed to spray paint. :'D The solution was to keep the garage door open and spray in the big open area (where the cars usually are, but during the time of day when I sprayed both mom and stepdad were at work) and pray that I don't accidentally spray something around me...

Priming in progress.
Ignore the random chainsaw in the background. XD

I primed all the parts and left them to dry in the garage. The drying time took longer than usual since it's cold indoors but oh well, I'm happy that I can even spray paint right now since the temperature has been dropping to -10 °C the past days while I was painting (16th November). I have this unsuccesful experience from trying to spray paint a prop sword in the middle of winter several years ago and the paint kind of "froze" and made this cracky, frosty surface on the sword; it ended up looking pretty ugly and I had to sand it out and repaint it. Don't want to risk the same thing happening again...
Oh and yeah, as a disclaimer I want to state it, in case someone is wondering, that I did indeed skip sanding and smoothing the worbla before painting. This was intentional because at this point I don't have the time for it (this prop needs to be done before school ends before Christmas) and I'm going for a worn and imperfect look anyway. One good thing with black worbla though is that its surface is smoother than regular worbla and thus it's pretty okay as-is and requires less work to look decent.

Once the primed parts had dried (I left them overnight) I did two coatings of silver spray paint on them. I left them to dry overnight again and on the following morning I went with stepdad to attach them; we had brainstormed through all possible adhesive candidates from wood glue to 2-component glues but settled on using PU-foam. The reason for this was that "it sticks like a disease" (stepdad's way of putting it :D) and because the majority of the Hunting Horn itself is foam as well it only felt natural that it would stick to itself. Also, because the foam expands it would also help in, at least partly, reseal whatever gaps or excess we carved out that was left around the horns/ears after being inserted. 

What we did was to take a can of PU-foam, spray a gentle click into each hole (one at a time) and some onto a piece of cardboard. We then took one horn/ear at a time, dipped it carefully into the expanding foam on the cardboard and then stuck it into the carved hole. If it didn't stick properly we took a tool (in our case a screwdriver because it was close at hand) and used it to spread around and even out the foam inside the hole, so that it would cover most surfaces. It was important that there wasn't too much foam in the holes because otherwise, once it started expanding, it might push out the inserted parts – but, on the opposite end, if there wasn't enough it might not get a strong enough hold and come off.

Horns and ears freshly attached. Notice the foam leaking out.

We made sure to angle both ears slightly upwards when inserting them and check so that the horns had approximately the same placement and curve to them; of course it was hard with the horns because they weren't symmetrical to start with (we even noticed after lodging them in that one horn is a bit longer than the other! Ceadeus laughs somewhere) but as long as it was "close enough" it was good.
Upon inserting each piece some foam would naturally seep out, which was pretty much a good thing because at least it would be sure to stick. I didn't try to clean up any of the excess foam as it would create a mess and be much harder to get rid off when it's fresh – it's wiser to wait until it has completely dried and then just cut it off. To play it safe we moved the whole build close to a wall (so that at least the longer horn wouldn't get pushed out) but, thankfully, because the fitting of the horns was snug they stayed up on their own and didn't need to be taped down, nor did they need any supporting structures to be placed under them.

 The last progress was done around 19th November and it took until 8th December before I got an opportunity to continue on this project. When I returned to check how the horns and ears had stuck I noticed that my stepdad had already cleaned up some of the " foam spillage" while I was away. I took a knife and cut off the small remains that I saw.

Excess foam remains cleaned up with a knife.

Now, to smoothen and seal the attachment points and whatever remaining gaps there were, I used some acrylic sealant again. I felt so fucking dumb (yes, I had a bad day) because I didn't notice that the cap was on when I started and so, when I took it out, the acrylic just went everywhere like an angry snake because of the built-up pressure. It was a mess and I wanted to die or something – stepdad had shown me just before how to use it and of course, as soon as he left, my dumbass self fucks things up. :)) #accomplished 
The only thing I could think at that point was my new-found motto "ois kiva jos onnistuis enemmän niin vituttais vähemmän".

Acrylic sealant.

I applied acrylic sealant around all the "seams" and smoothened it down with fingers dipped in water. This was a bit tedious to do as I needed to be careful because if my fingers weren't moist enough then the acrylic would stick to my skin but, on the contrary, if my fingers were too watery then the acrylic would turn runny. Hard to keep that perfect balance that was the best to work with.
It was also really hard to get to the gap behind/under the back of the horns – it took some rotating and cursing and some really precise application to get there. I used a piece of this kind of thick bendable plastic rope(?) that I used as an extension of my hand to get to otherwise impossible-to-reach spots.

Acrylic sealant added.

I left it to dry overnight. Once it had dried some days later I noticed that the front had sunken in a bit and the transition point was thus showing from under the acrylic. I applied some more acrylic and left it to dry again.

Christmas stress happened and I didn't get to continue on this project past my school's due date for it. Luckily I was basically about 90% done and could use my progress up to this point in the oral presentation that I had to do for my teacher a few days before school ended. With the deadline out of the way I could now do the remaining work without having to worry about time constraints, which meant that on the very last days of December I took up the work again.

Acrylic seams painted over.

On the photo above I had hidden the acrylic seams by spraying them silver. As soon as they had dried properly I could finally start to paint the head! I did the red parts first, just like the previous time, and used my 4U game as a reference to check how the face markings approximately went. I also put some red on the ears and the upper half of the horns.

Head painted red.

Once the head was painted I turned it around and painted the backside of the horns and, while at it, I decided to fix one detail on the body of the Hunting Horn that had been bothering me since I made it. You see, earlier on the painting process I ran into an issue of the body patterns not lining up and decided on a whim to add a "cross section" on the top part of the body to try and make the distances appear smaller. It's really hard to explain what I mean but in the previous post I mentioned that it was impossible to get the details to be symmetrical because of its size – and because I could never see the whole thing at once while painting it (because I had to constantly rotate it). So yeah, while the crosses lined up okay on the front the backside messed up. And I'm not gonna lie – ever since I did that one additional cross it had been bothering me extremely much and now, when I was painting the head anyway, I decided to cover it up.

Cover-up. Great example of how much difference the darkening
with black acrylic did to the original color.

Once the red paint had dried I went over it with black acrylic to darken/weather it. I used the same technique as last time, which basically meant applying paint and then quickly wiping most of it off with a paper towel. When I had gone through all the areas with black paint I took the green acrylic (which I had borrowed from art class) and painted the base color of the eyes with it. I left it to dry after that.

It stayed untouched for the remainder of December and a majority of January (I wanted to complete it earlier but school happened). I finished painting the details of the eyes on 28th January. Sadly the green base paint had cracked a bit and it partly peeled off when I was drybrushing the black onto the edges of the eyes. Good thing I managed to hide it by painting over it and now the tiny cracks are hardly visible, success!

Eyes painted.

Now I just had to add a couple or so coatings of clear varnish to seal the whole thing and then it was done! The varnish protects the paint and it's thus always worthwhile to finish a project by sealing it with clear varnish, especially if you want the paint job to stay on longer. My varnish was glossy so it also gave the surface this nice shine to it.

Below are photos of the finished Eldaora's Taus. *basks in the glory*

Not gonna lie, I feel like I've surpassed myself with this project and I'm extremely proud that I even managed to make such a big and challenging cosplay prop (it's very different from anything I've done before!) but, at the same time, I know I could have done it even better if I would have had more time, money and patience. Improvements would have been stuff like making the horn/ear bases smoother, adding worbla to make layer differences and raised details on the shaft, mixing in some brown paint for even more color details and such – maybe one day I'll go back to this project and upgrade it or not. Whatever the case, I love this massive beast of a prop and I'm happy that I gathered the courage to even attempt to make it in the first place. Gotta believe in yourself!

But hey, my Hunting Horn (aka my first Monster Hunter cosplay part) build process is over with this post and I'm more than happy with how it turned out in the end; it took a crapload of work, sweat and tears to make but now it's done and ready to swing into action! I can't wait to make an armor set and wear it out to a con, it's gonna be gargwawesome!
Next part: come up with a way to add the sound effects.. although I think I'll have to provide the toots myself, for now. xD *enter Hunting Horn sounds here*

Thank you for reading and do leave a comment if you found this project of interest! Would like to see more Monster Hunter builds from me in the future? Hunt safe and don't let the Kut-Ku bite you!

~ Shiro Samurai

MH4U Eldaora's Taus Hunting Horn cosplay prop [part 6]

Hello wyverns and hunters!

Here comes the sixth part of my massive Monster Hunter cosplay build project – I'm making a Hunting Horn called Eldaora's Taus from Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, one of my most played video games to date. I've been a big fan of the franchise ever since I played Freedom Unite and making a costume from the series has been a dream of mine for many years and now it's happening!

I am currently only making the weapon but I will make a complete armor set later to go with it, of course. I'm not doing naked runs. *insert Khezu screams here*
You have no idea what I've made before I got to this point in the progress? No worries, all the previous parts of this project can be found here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Note: this project is split into several parts because otherwise it would turn into a kilometer post; I need to document my progress carefully (many photos etc) since it's a school project.

Let the quest begin!

Hunting Horn spray primed.

During my last progress I ended the post with the gluing episode incomplete and that's because I ran out of glue. My mom had bought new glue during a trip afterwards – it was just an ordinary white wood glue but it did the job. I completed gluing the surface for protection and after that I finally got to the fun stuff – prepare for painting! 

Above you can see the start of my priming process. I used spray primer because it's quicker and easier when it comes to covering such a big object. Sadly it didn't take long before I ran out of my primer cans and had to go buy more. A lot more.

I was in a hurry to prime the whole thing during mid-October because the weather was unpredictable and the sky constantly looked like it might rain any minute, but according to the forecast it shouldn't. For once I didn't have shit luck and the weather stayed rain-free for the whole day that I was spraying. 

Note: I have to take some risks with the weather because I'm running out of time – as soon as it gets cold outside I can't spray paint anymore and that would be a huge problem since I need to finish this project before Christmas. And yes, I live high up in the north so cold weather is guaranteed and often early...

Just a couple cans...

On the photo above all the cans inside the plastic bags were newly bought (and the one with the lid off) and the ones without plastic I had from previous projects. I'm hoping these will be enough. There's also of course the empty primer cans that are not pictured. On the photo there's silver spray paint, gray primer and glossy clear varnish for finishing.

I turned the Hunting Horn around and primed the other side as well. After that I took it back inside the garage to dry overnight.

The next morning I went back to the garage to take a look. Meanwhile I stared at my progress I started considering using worbla to make the eyes more three-dimensional by making "eyeballs" that I'd sink into the carved eye holes. Soon enough I made that idea happen and took out the heat gun and some worbla scrap pieces that I had saved in a plastic bag. For those not in the know worbla is a heat-activated thermoplastic widely used by costumers to create a wide variety of items.

I molded the worbla scraps first into a ball and then into a "caterpillar shape", once done I reheated the worbla and pressed it into the eye holes to let it cool down. Repeat for the other eye.

Eyes accented with worbla.

When I was done with both eyeballs I noticed that the eyes were in a different angle (it became even more obvious after attaching the eyeballs!) and it looked really stupid. That's when I figured that I could save my Horn from looking retarded if I redefined the "brow ridges" to be more similar to one another. I took some more worbla scraps, molded them together and made even longer caterpillars with my fingers and then pressed them in place. It was really hard to get both sides to be symmetrical and honestly, they aren't. But it's a lot better than before and the accented ridges gave the face more definition anyway, which looks cooler.

I couldn't be bothered to start sanding the worbla smoother since the rest of the surface isn't smooth anyway (I'm gonna make it look battle-worn!) and thus I went out to spray paint the whole shebang silver. Again the weather was moist and not ideal but at least it didn't rain this time either and I got done in time.

Silver spray paint in progress. First coat.

I did two coatings of silver spray paint and then carried the Horn back inside, into safety from the weather. It was during this point that I realized that I had forgotten to add the little outwards-facing pointy mane spike at the top of the "hair bananas" but, frankly, the more I thought about it the more I felt like omitting that small detail was the best choice anyway. It would surely break easily and, seeing how it would face a different direction than the rest of the manes, it would make it really hard (if not impossible) to rotate the thing around and I'd rather not make it even harder to handle and for future storage than what it will be already...

Honestly, I'm sort of dreading how I'm gonna maneuver this thing after I've attached the long horns because you don't want to know how many times I've already accidentally smacked this shit into doors, walls etc when turning/moving it while walking. xD

Eye area sprayed. The seam didn't transition as neatly as I hoped...

Once I had sprayed the first coat of silver paint I noticed how the worbla's seams above the ridge were a bit too noticeable. I asked stepdad if we had anything I could use to soften the transition and the options were silicone or acrylic sealant. I went with acrylic sealant because at least it was the safer choice when it came to painting it and it could be sanded as well.

Acrylic sealant added.

I dipped a finger in water and used it to slick over the acrylic and shape it how I wanted it to be. It has a long drying time so I did this before going to sleep and so it could dry over the night.

The following day it had cured and I sprayed it silver. It's not perfect but with the acrylic it looks better than without it. The acrylic stays a bit elastic even when dry and so I just pressed it down with my fingers to flatten it down and press the seams as minimal as I could.

On the next day (17th October) I started the detail painting, which meant painting with brushes by hand. I had bought a rustic red paint earlier but decided to try do the shadowing effects first with black paint – which in hindsight was a bad idea. The thing is that we had no normal black paint at home, only spray paint. I knew that for weathering and dry-brushing effects I would need ordinary paint but still decided to try with spray paint. I used a plastic bowl and sprayed a lot of spray paint in it, until I had enough for it to create a thin liquid, which I then quickly wiped off with a cloth. Just as I feared the spray paint was too intense in pigment and dried way too fast for me to be able to get the desired effect. I gave up on the shadowing/weathering for now and began the rust color painting episode instead.

Started hand-painting the rust red details
Unsuccessful black spray paint experimenting visible.

While painting I realized it would be hard as piss to get it symmetrical and so I just decided to free-hand the details instead and hope for the best; I kept my MH4U game open as a reference, even though I had to change or leave out some details because of how different my Horn is shaped when compared to the in-game model.

I used different painting techniques to get different effects and varying color intensity, although I will need to add more depth and shadows to the red with black paint later. It's a bit too flat right now and, to be honest, I'm not happy with the color because it's a bit too bright (it's more vibrant in real life than on photos) and I expected a more dull and brownish red, like shown on the lid...

Painting in progress. Why do I inflict this pain upon myself?

I of course always had to paint one side first, wait for it to dry, rotate it carefully and then paint the next side. Rinse and repeat.

Painting the backside...

I must admit that I'm not happy with how the body's "crosses" lined up on the backside. I knew that things would mess up considering how I can never see the whole Horn from all angles at once and thus I have to improvise as I go on, rotating it while I progress and then, if I notice that something's off or doesn't line up at the end when I meet up again at the starting spot, it's already way too late to do anything to try to fix what went wrong. So yeah, this thing hasn't even seen symmetry. xD

Once I was done painting the red, except for the head, it was time to move on to the weathering effect. I went to buy some ordinary black acrylic paint (art paint) and used a small brush and a cloth to wipe off all the excess paint, leaving only a small to moderate darkening effect as I went on. This was time-consuming and annoying at times.

Weathered upper head to the (watcher's) left,
untouched original color to the right.

The point of the black paint was to darken the overall appearance (since the rust red was too bright) as well as provide a weathering effect and make the whole build have more depth.
I dipped black paint into occasional uneven spots (holes etc) and when I wiped it off the paint stayed in the crevices and gave a cool worn look.

Darkening, darkening, darkening...

Many hours later I was done adding and wiping off black paint. The end result looks better now than without the black. I know that I could have done a better job with more color gradients and shadows etc but I don't have the time for it right now and, besides, almost all of the paints I've been using have been of different types (alkyd, acrylic, spray etc) and I don't want to try mixing different paint types while fresh because I have no idea how they would react to one another.

Black paint session complete, save for the head.

Alternative photo of the same progress as above but seen from another angle here.

Now the only things left was to finish up the horns and ears, attach them to the head and then paint the head and eyes – sounds easy when you say it like that, but on further thought I realized that I might need to change my plans a bit when it comes to how exactly I will attach the horns as some issues showed up; I want to make sure that they'll actually stay on and not break off from smaller impacts and thus I thought that I'll end this post here and make a final, seventh part, for finishing up this thing as I suspect the horns and ears process might get a bit longer than I initially thought. So yeah, I originally totally intended for this sixth part to be the final one sorry but I think I'll just make a seventh post to avoid this one turning super long since yeah, photos quickly make a post long and there will be some explaining... xD

Thanks for following my progress on this MonHun prop and keep your eyes peeled for the final part!

~ Shiro Samurai

MH4U Eldaora's Taus Hunting Horn cosplay prop [part 5]

Hello costumers and hunters alike!

Here comes the fifth part of my bigass Monster Hunter cosplay project – I'm making a Hunting Horn called Eldaora's Taus from Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. I've been a dedicated fan of the game series since I touched Freedom Unite and now I'm finally making one of my cosplay dreams come true – a MonHun costume!  

I am for now just doing the weapon but I will make an armor set later, to go with this build. 
No idea what I've done before this? :D No worries, the previous parts of this project can be found here: 1, 2, 3, 4

Note: this project is split into several parts because otherwise it would turn into a kilometer post; I need to document my progress carefully (many photos etc) since it's a school project.

Let's go, yo-ho!

Added filler to the face.

So, remember that little tube of filler that stepdad brought when I ran out of the original filler that I was using? I used it up in like 30 minutes. xD He then came with a 3 kilo bucket on the following day and, honestly, I've used up half of it as well just trying to cover up this thing. I don't want to think about it but I've probably used like 5 kilos worth of filler on this project by now...

Doing the whole filler covering is really tedious and time-consuming. I mean, every time I add filler somewhere I have to wait for it to dry before I can rotate this thing, on the floor, to get to the opposite side. The more filler there is the longer it takes to dry (thicker layers dry slowly) and yeah, this part of the process has taken up a lot of time.

The last parts that I added filler to was all the spots that were hard to reach – like all the deep and narrow splits separating the "hair bananas" on the back mane, for example. Once that was done I left it to dry for some days.

Around mid-May I returned to mom's to work on this project. Next up was to sand the whole thing to make it smoother. It's not super visible on the photos how uneven it was after the filler but below is a close-up on which you can really see the uneven and textured surface.

Head before sanding.

So what do I do? I bring out all the sand papers and get to work, of course! It needs to be mentioned that so far I've done all of the work inside the garage, but for the sanding process I carried the Hunting Horn outside and put it on a working table. Mainly to make cleaning easier afterwards and the weather was nice.

No one can say that there's not enough sand papers.

Okay, I'm not gonna lie – I had somehow underestimated how much time sanding actually takes. Like I've done it a lot in my life but still I had not counted it into my plans and it was just this "nah, it'll just take a couple hours tops and then I can move on to the next thing". Oh, so wrong I was. xD 
So yeah, even just the rough sanding (60 grit sand paper) took 6+ hours. Guess if I was sick and tired of sanding after a while? I was. It was really tedious and I just wanted to get it done so that I could get forward since, at this point, I was really stressed about potential deadlines.

Rough sanding done.
Anyone want to snort the table? ::DD

I didn't actually do any sanding with finer grit papers since it felt like it would be impossible to get it perfectly smooth and even anyway... especially something of this size. There's a myriad of spots where the foam still peeks through and the foam has all these small air bubbles etc and it's just never gonna be a perfect porcelain finish, lol. Anyone who has worked with expanding foam knows what kind of texture it has – it just felt like a lot of time and work just to make it "a little less uneven", if that makes sense. Also, a lot of the filler was unevenly applied as well, meaning that even after sanding the surface random holes and level differences kept appearing, making the surface bumpy and lively. It's really hard to explain but it's this thing that when you apply an amount of filler to a surface and let it dry, it will show its undermost "layers" (in the exact same position they originally hardened in) once you sand through the outer layers.

Oh well, at this point I just decided that screw perfection and let's go for a more realistic and battle-worn appearance instead. I mean, in the Monster Hunter games any weapon would be made from slain monster materials: fangs, claws, scales, shells, wing webbings and the list goes on. Oh and yes, slain monsters, meaning that a hunter –or a group of them– has been beating the poor monster to death with various weapons ranging from Great Swords to Hammers and Bows. :D So yeah, with that logic the monster parts used, most likely, were far from in pristine condition and came with whatever bumps, dents and cuts that the hunters inflicted during the hunt...
The Eldaora's Taus is made from materials from the (rusted) Kushala Daora, a powerful Elder Dragon with metal skin and wind-controlling abilities. Hence why I'm gonna paint this thing a metallic silver later on and add rusted accents, just like in the references and in the game.

Eldaora's Taus reference from a MonHun art book.

As you can see in the art book it looks different from the game (I don't own the art book, a fellow MonHun fan sent this to me online!) and because I had no access to the art book I based my representation of the weapon on the in-game model and took multiple artistic liberties to make my life easier while making it. As I've mentioned in earlier progress posts it's thus not 100% accurate and that's a choice I made during the process to save my sanity.

Okay so, back to the sanding. I didn't even bother to sand it perfectly even and there are small imperfections everywhere. At this point I just don't have an infinite amount of time left on this project and thus I decided to just make it more realistic instead, as mentioned above.
But yeah, after all that tedious sanding there was a shitlot of white filler dust everywhere and yes, in every single hard-to-reach crevice on the damn Horn. Good thing stepdad has this special cousin to the common vaccuum cleaner that is just right for the task!

Hello my best friend!

I carefully vaccuumed all over the Hunting Horn, every nook and every cranny, to get rid off as much loose dust as possible. This took quite some time. Before I even started vaccuuming it I could slap the Horn anywhere and these huge white clouds of dust would just explode out of it and float everywhere. xD There was a lot of dust, seriously. My working clothes were all white from it...
Oh and yeah, all that white dust left on the table? I threw it out in the backyard and hey, over at my Instagram you can see how I made some unintentional art with it!

I noticed a not-so-fun thing soon after. :( You see, because both filler and PU-foam are kinda soft and porous materials they get dented easily. I noticed during the sanding that these weird dent lines had appeared at the shaft and I wondered where they had come from – turned out it was from the pressure of the shaft hanging off the table's edge and being pressed down from the weight of the Hunting Horn's main body, against the table.

Red arrows pointing at the dents formed from the table's edge.

Those dents pictured above were actually some of the smaller ones. There was this approximately 15 cm long deep dent on one of the "hair bananas" as well. I was not happy when I saw it. Oh well, no can do but to go back to the filler stage and cover up the dents.

New filler added on marked areas (there were more) to cover
up dents and holes in the foam.

I left it to dry over a couple days and when I came back I sanded it down, to make it look like nothing had happened to it. At this point I also started thinking that if it already takes notable surface damage from minor pressure etc then God knows how much damage it would suffer when taken to a full day at an anime convention! 
My grinding gears were grinding, fast – I had to figure out what to do to make it more tolerant to outer impacts; I needed to make its surface harder. I mean seriously, nothing would suck more than doing all that intricate painting work and then have the whole thing dented or chip off because of the surface below the paint not being strong enough. It would be so frustrating!

My first thought was to cover it in worbla but then I realized that it would need a lot of worbla sheets and worbla is expensive. I then remembered reading some expanding foam prop tutorials on which it was recommended to cover the surface of the foam with papier-maché, probably the most known way to do it but honestly, I don't really like working with papier-maché and would rather avoid it, if possible (it's so messy and tedious). :/ Besides, it would be incredibly time-consuming to cover a build of this size and especially considering that papier-maché requires several layers. I just don't have the time nor patience for that right now and so I looked around for other solutions. I even considered Plasti-Dip (never used it before) but scrapped that idea because I read somewhere that it doesn't really add hardness.

Another problem that made this whole coating issue a bit more troublesome was the fact that the Hunting Horn is already really heavy for a cosplay prop, probably weighing in at anywhere between 10-20 kg for the moment – not gonna lie, it's easily my heaviest prop to date. I'm bad at guessing weight but it's definitely heavy enough to be impossible to lift with one arm and it's even harder to carry since the weight is not balanced at the center but at the main bulk of the body, meaning the head area. So yeah, in other words I ain't gonna easily be swinging this thing around by holding it at the shaft, not even with both arms.
In other words – I must try to keep the weight down as much as possible, which also limits my choices; no one wants to carry around a heavy-ass prop for a whole day at a convention. I've honestly been thinking about the weight all along during this process (hence my material choices) but even with that in mind the extreme size and unbalanced bulk of the prop takes its toll along the way. I'm sure there would have been lighter and more convenient options on how to build this thing but this is all a big learning experience for me and my first big and challenging prop in this caliber.

So yeah, I ruled out worbla and Plasti-Dip. I also didn't want to invest in any of the resins nor fiber glass because I lack the know-how and don't feel comfortable getting into toxic materials yet. Stepdad pulled a blank when I asked him (much to my surprise) and so, after thinking and searching, I figured that my cheapest and easiest choice would probably be to just go ghetto and use the old glue-and-water trick. It's probably not the most effective option out there but I've used it before to seal/harden stuff like craft foam and it has done its job decently enough to get a pass – and it shouldn't be one of those materials that dissolves the PU-foam either.

On early September I returned to try the glue trick. Stepdad suggested not diluting the glue to avoid it getting too runny and thus not very effective. I decided to heed his advice, it's worth a try to see if it's possible to just directly brush the glue on and have it harden nicely without making the surface all streaky and ugly.

First layer of glue hardened on the shaft. Notice the shine!

I used normal white glue that you can find in most stores. The brand I used is Eri Keeper (Finnish brand) but any PVA-based glue should work. To my relief the glue seems to work decently – it doesn't turn rock-hard or anything but it clearly stiffens up the surface a bit, while still keeping the elasticity, and gives it a nice shiny coating (no visible brush streaks!) as well. I'll need to do a couple or so layers but it works and that's the main point.

One thick layer of glue added.

I ran out of glue before I got done with the front (this thing just ate it up!) and thus took a break from gluing and went to finally do some more progress on the protruding parts – the horns and ears.
My original plan was to cover these in expanding foam and carve them out but yeah, the more I thought about it the more I felt like there had to be a better option. I had previously made the base shape for the horns and ears out of wire net.
After some thinking I remembered that I have two big rolls of black worbla, a thermoplastic used by cosplayers, lying around in the storage; I ordered them some years ago from Germany and have barely used them. The drawback with worbla is that it's so expensive and I haven't used it much, so this will be my first time using worbla for covering some more complicated shapes. I've only done really simple stuff with it before. ^^"
I needed to cover the horns and ears in something to make the worbla have some sort of surface to stick to, especially since the wire net has holes all over it and well, when the worbla gets heated up it gets soft and malleable and would probably just sink through the holes... or something.

#grillivartaat :DD

Budget thinking led me to use extra-strong aluminium foil; it should be able to stand the warm worbla being applied on top and also provide enough support. I just basically wrapped the foil tightly around each shape and then just carefully pressed it down into a snug fit. I kept the foil together (the horns are made of several pieces of foil) by adding some masking tape to cover seams, edges and the like.
I'll get to the worbla part the next time – now I want to get the base treatment over first so that I can get to painting and attaching the protruding parts. So yeah, with the glue gone my work stood still. Stepdad suddenly remembered that he had some kind of leftover glue-ish filler lying around somewhere and went to fetch it – the plan was to experiment and see if it could do the same thing that the glue did, namely harden the surface.

Renovation filler.

I'm sorry I don't have a photo of what it actually looked like but it was similar to normal filler, except perhaps a bit more gooey. It's like filler mixed with glue (some sort of wallpaper adhesive?) so we thought that maybe, if we mixed it with water to get the consistency more liquidish, it could work. We did a test spot and left it to dry but once I came back it didn't seem to have done much of a difference. :( It mainly just darkened up the spot we applied it to and I didn't really notice a difference on the surface's texture. We decided to go back to the glue method, although I think this might have worked if we had used less water but oh well, the glue is safer. I'm sure I'll get some use for this glue-filler later for other projects, heheh.

I feel like this post is getting a bit too long right now so I'll just split it here and yeah, keep your eyes peeled for part 6!

~ Shiro Samurai

MH4U Eldaora's Taus Hunting Horn cosplay prop [part 4]

Hello all cosplay and MonHun fans! 

What you're now reading is the fourth part of my big Monster Hunter cosplay project – I'm making a Hunting Horn called Eldaora's Taus from Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. I've been a huge fan of the game series since Freedom Unite and now I'm finally slowly making one of my cosplay dreams a reality – a MonHun costume!  

I decided to start with the weapon prop and I will do the armor separately, later. I'm fairly certain on what armor I'll do but I'll keep it a secret for now, hehe. It's gonna be from 4U too, of course.
For the previous parts of this project you can find them here: 1, 2, 3

Note: this project is split into several parts because otherwise it would turn into a kilometer post; I need to document my progress carefully (many photos etc) since it's a school project. 

Let's get to it!

Reference of the end knob's shape. Enjoy my hunter's manbutt.

I left off last time with shaping the end knob and yeah, it was rage-inducing because of all the angles. xD The next day when I went back to my working space I noticed that I hadn't carved it in the right shape, bummer! I had done it from memory the last time (didn't have references at that time) and I thought that it was shaped like a rhombus but no, not quite. So yeah, I corrected it a little and then shifted my focus elsewhere – namely to those protruding parts on the shaft of the Hunting Horn. I'm not sure what their purpose is but I'd assume that in the games its either the sound pipes or some kind of buttons that the hunter presses to create the different notes. I might be horribly wrong on both though, but whatever they are supposed to be I had to add them to my creation!

Notice the protruding parts on the lower half of the shaft.

A slightly better angle to view them from.

They are placed so that the outermost ones still show when
viewed from the other side.

To create these, err, let's just call them pipes, I had to sacrifice my stepdad's old broom. Good thing he planned to replace the shaft of it anyway and so I didn't have to feel bad about it. The wood itself had seen better days (it had cracked on top) and so I had to use the middle of it because it was the most healthy part.

Rest in pieces, broom. ;_;

Three pieces, each of 10 cm, were cut out. I left the handling of those for later (filing, sanding) and I started to think of what to use to cover the Hunting Horn with. As far as I know the most common material that cosplayers use for covering is a combination of masking tape and papier-maché. It was an instant no to me because I don't even want to imagine how hard it would be to tape around a prop of this size! Not to mention how many rolls it would take. So yeah, had to come up with something else – and then I remembered that back when I made Harada's spear a couple years ago I coated the spearhead with filler/putty/whatever-you-call-it and it worked amazingly. Sure that the Hunting Horn is on a completely different size scale but at least it seemed like a better option than the tape and papier-maché.

Test-run of the filler, to see if it can also
cover up the bigger holes.

Stepdad showed up, fetched the bucket of filler and we test applied it to some particularly hole-filled/uneven parts of the Hunting Horn. He said that, because of the depth of the horns, the filler might sink in when it attempts to dry and, if that happens, another layer will be needed. No big deal I thought and, besides, it seemed to apply effortlessly and neatly – looked really promising, in other words! Now I just needed to wait a full day for it to dry.

The next day dawned and I headed out to check what the filler had done over the night. I noticed that where the deeper holes had been covered (aka where there was a big amount of filler) the filler had cracked a bit. Nothing that can't be hidden underneath a second layer though! I also noticed that it wasn't completely dry yet.
Being quite pleased with the filler result I took some more of the gray stuff and started patching up the Hunting Horn, focusing on covering the bigger holes (air bubbles left by the foam, mainly) and such first. I made sure to not accidentally put a second layer over a spot that hadn't completely dried yet, because otherwise the drying time would get slowed down a lot more.

Patching up the worst holes with filler.

I didn't cover it up properly because I still need to carve out holes for the pipes so that I can sink them into the shaft. Speaking of the pipes, I rounded and sanded them down a bit before I left to go back home to my apartment. I left the other end untouched since it won't matter because it will be embedded into the shaft anyway.

Sanded pipe things for the shaft.

After almost a month, in mid-July, I returned to work on this project (I got a summer job! I mainly continued with covering the whole shebang in filler, which is quite a time-consuming project because of the shape and size. I also carved out the holes for the pipes (with a knife) and attached them. I had marked out the position and instead of using glue I just sprayed a click of PU-foam onto the bottom of each hole and then just planted the non-sanded end of the pipe in there. It stuck very well.

Pipe placement test (not attached) and filler progress.

After "gluing" on the pipes I used the remainder of the foam can (maybe 1/4 left) to fill in holes in the foam to make my filler life easier. I also added some foam to a couple of the back mane's spiky ends because there were huge and/or missing gaps. 

Foam, what are you doing? Foam, stop.

Above is one of the back mane spikes that I wanted to thicken, since it was super flat at the end. The problem was that I couldn't rotate the thing so that this particular area was facing straight up (because there were other newly foamed areas on other places), straight up is of course the ideal curing position because of avoiding gravity screwing things up. The consistency of the foam was a bit funny as well (this was the very end of the can so yeah, extra runny) and so it slowly just started gliding downwards and all I could do was watch, since I had already tilted it as much as I could (without fucking up other areas) and turning it any more would end up with some other foamed areas hitting the ground and/or falling off, including the pipes.
Oh well, luck in misfortune was that the area that the spike foam ended up covering by accident was actually a spot that needed some fixing anyway – there was a visible carving mistake there that I didn't notice until after I had put filler on it, which made it more obvious. *shrugs*

Foam added to cover holes, pipes attached
and continued to put filler on head area.

Bonus!
My empty foam can wanted to be artsy til its dying breath. xD

I had put some quite thick layers of filler to cover up the unevenness of the foam, which means that it'll take some days for it to dry completely. I also covered up some of the earlier cracked spots with a second layer.
I also realized that I shouldn't attacht the horns and ears until I've completed the filler episode because yeah, once the horns and ears are set I won't be able to rotate the Hunting Horn as freely as I can now without risk of breaking off the protruding parts.

The next day I came back to tidy up the foamed areas, which mainly meant cutting off the excess foam wherever needed and then (re)shaping and improving the back; a couple of the back mane bananas had huge gaps in them, especially close to the tips (because of the foam randomly leaving big holes when it cures). I had also used foam to thicken the handle a bit.
After the foam episode was done I continued to apply filler.

A lot of filler later.

And then I ran out of filler. :'D So. Much. Filler. You might notice that on the photo above I left one of the middle mane's without filler, that was simply so that I had somewhere to hold the damn thing to keep it from moving while I put filler everywhere else. Stepdad brought a new tube on the day after and so I used it to cover that bare spot and some other stuff. 

I still have to put more filler on this thing, before I can start sanding, but I feel like this post is getting a bit long and so I'll end it for this time. ^^; Part 5 coming up later so keep checking back in, yo!

~ Shiro Samurai out.