Samurai armor

Yesterday I started making Masamune's samurai style upper arm armor. Of course before starting I looked at a lot of my Masamune references and two of them were these:

Okay, inconsistent references anyone? I looked at most of my references and the color of Masamune's lacing changed from white to brown and I think I saw blue somewhere and in the anime there is none at all. Also the amount of lacing rows and armor plates seemed inconsistent too the more different pictures I looked at... oh come on!

There's just three rows of armor plates on this figure..

So instead of trying to figure out the "real way" Masamune's upper arm armor was supposed to be I decided to take some artistic liberties and just do some free designing inspired by actual samurai armor. Yeah, you could say I thought "to hell with 100% character accuracy" and saved myself more headache from ever-changing references by doing my own take on the armor. Oh, but before that I googled "samurai armor" and got inspired. I payed attention to the different ways the lacing was done.

Samurai armor
(photo found on Google)

When I felt I had an idea on what I was soon to be working on I decided to let it roll!
First thing I did was to make a mini size armor out of paper and draw a lot of dots on it; the dots would be the holes for the lacing.

Paper armor test pattern

I didn't count or plan how many holes I needed in advance. I just marked the holes while I went on and added or changed the spacing if I noticed something didn't look right. When I felt I had something that might work I cut out the paper pattern, cut it in half, took a sewing needle and thread and started to improvice "lacing it" to check if I had enough holes.

My "lacing" test with a sewing needle and thread

I decided three armor plates were enough and four rows of lacing. By the way, my mini paper armor had just two rows, I cut it in half.
   When I thought about it I figured I wouldn't want the threads to start at the showing side of the armor so I made extra holes on the top plate so that the lace would start/end on the inside instead.

Now it's better ~

After experimenting with the mini paper armor test for a while I felt confident enough to start making the real deal. I used polystyrene sheets for the armor and measured and cut out two pieces. I also marked on the inside some faint pencil lines where each plate would start and end.

Cut out armor pieces

With the pieces cut out I went outside to shape them with a heat gun. I wanted a nice bend in the middle, but not a very sharp one. The heat forming succeeded very well.

Shaped armor pieces ~

The reason why I decided to shape the armor while it was still a single piece, instead of cutting it into the three plates and heat forming them individually, was to make sure all three soon-to-be plates would have the same curve to them and fit on top of each other, with a slight overlap, when assembled later.

Next thing I did was that I cut the big piece into three parts along the marked cutting lines on the inside. After cutting the big piece I now had three separate plates and, well, I drew a lot of dots on them. I used my former mini paper armor as a reference for the hole placement.

My three armor plates filled with hole markings..

... and now to make them into, well, holes.

Hello drill ~

I took a scrap piece of polystyrene and drilled two holes in it just to check if it worked. It worked like a charm, no cracks or problems whatsoever and easy to drill through! Yay!

Drill test

I took the scrap piece with me and went inside to find some suitable ribbon or cord for lacing. I didn't find any cords so I set for ribbon instead. I took what we had at home and the best I could find was this 5 mm white glossy ribbon. I tried threading it through the holes to check if the hole was big enough for the ribbon to run through freely but still not too big and well..

.. it was pretty much perfect!

Okay, so I was ready to drill holes. But before I did that I wanted to sand the edges a bit because they were a bit rough from the cutting. Sanding worked pretty okay on polystyrene.

After smoothing the edges a bit

And now.. well.. time to drill! Of course I did the drilling (and sanding) outside.

First armor piece drilled

A lot of drilling and frozen fingers later I had armor plates full of holes. No joke.

So many.. holes...!

That was all the progress I did yesterday. Today when I woke up I went to continue with the armors and well, next up was to paint them. I used the same black semi gloss spray paint as before.. I've used up more than half the bottle already, oops. I gave the showing side a coating first and let them dry for some time on my makeshift working table outside in the "car garage".

Newly sprayed with the first coating

Some time later I returned to paint the inside of the armors after the outside had dried.

Inside sprayed with paint

When the inside was dry I turned all the plate pieces over and noticed that while the showing side had been drying the spray paint had slowly flowed from the sides towards the middle bend. Also some of the paint had gathered at the very sides and left these small build-ups.

Gravity, I hate you sometimes.

This demonstrates the "flowing paint problem" (lighter parts, not full coverage)
and the "spray paint build-up".

Oh well, a second coating easily fixed the first problem.. but the spray paint build-up was still visible underneath because well.. there is more paint there, duh. Oh well, I didn't feel like trying to sand it down or anything and it doesn't bother me so much anyway so whatever.
While the second paint coating was drying I decided to move my makeshift table, with the armors, out in the sunshine so that the paint would dry quicker. It seemed like a great idea... until a random strong gust of wind appeared and blew all my armor pieces into the snow. My face was like:

Yeeeeeah...

Luckily most pieces had already dried enough not to have the snow get stuck everywhere but well, one of the plates got these "snow was here" bubble prints on the surface and it bothered me.. so I sprayed over them.

Oh well, after all plates were dry I took them inside and begun lacing them together with the ribbon. I burned the ends of the ribbon each time I cut it so that it wouldn't unravel. Oh, and about the lacing, I didn't use any "historically accurate" or whatever way to lace it, I just improvised and used some real samurai armor pictures as inspiration/guiding.

Burning ribbon ends

Two rows of lacing done

The lacing process was pretty tedious and took me a few hours. I was very careful with making sure that the ribbon didn't twist itself at any point during the lacing; I wanted it to lay neat and straight. Every time there was any error I undid parts of the lacing until everything was right and the ends I just tied together in the back.

This is what my armor looked like when done:

Finished Masamune samurai armor pieces ~

I must say I'm really happy with how these turned out! I know they are not exact replicas of the ones Masamune wears (and you know that too if you read what I wrote at the beginning of the post) but I like them like this, 20% cooler ~

Polystyrene for leg armors

I've been working on Masamune's leg armor the last days but I haven't done a blog post about it yet. I'll write about it now so that I don't get one super long post.. and besides I've come to a point (read: I ran into a problem) where I must wait before I can continue working with them. *shrugs* Oh well, I'll write at least something now.

Okay, so I've had this roll of polystyrene since late November last year and on last Wednesday (3rd April) I finally started working with it. I've never worked with polystyrene sheets before and there doesn't seem to be so much talk about it being used for cosplay projects (I can find tutorials about styrene used for cosplay but not polystyrene..) on the internet either.. so with that said I had to do the trial and error approach to this one. Oh well, you won't learn if you are afraid to try something new so here goes!

Polystyrene sheet after being freed from most of the protective wrapping...

... and loose.

I don't remember the dimensions of my sheet but I'm pretty sure it was 1000x2000mm and 1 or 1,5 mm thick. Oh well, with the polystyrene rolled out I decided to check, well, how to cut it.

Here's the two candidates ~

It was pretty hard to cut, you had to use some force but it's possible to cut with ordinary (heavier) Fiskars scissors for example.
I took my leg armor patterns and drew one of them with a pencil on the polystyrene and cut it out.

One leg armor piece drafted on the material..

... and cut out.

Okay, I noticed pretty early it's hard to change directions during the cutting. You can curve if you do it little by little but any more noticeable/angled or sudden curves and you'll be cursing. Or well.. at least I was about to. Thank god Masamune's armor is pretty simple in shapes so I got by without further "perkele" storms.

Before finishing for the day I took a scrap piece of the plastic and went to check how well it would take spray paint. I didn't do anything to the surface prior to spraying and it took the spray like a charm!

Aaww yeeaah!

The next day (4th April) I took a scrap piece of polystyrene and went to test heat forming it outside with the heat gun and it was a...

... SUCCESS!
(and protection gloves are pop)

With the scrap piece shaping successful I took my actual armor pieces and gave them the same treatment. The only thing you have to be careful with during the heat forming is not to overheat the plastic or well.. it will melt and be ruined. You will notice during the heating when it's getting hot enough so its shape can be changed, just turn the heat gun off when you feel it loses some of its sturdiness and keep it in its new shape until it cools down. If the form didn't turn out as you wanted you can just reheat and reshape it.. but be careful because you might get these.. err.. "heatbumps". I got a few but they don't bother me.

Oh, also, I shaped everything with just my hands. You would likely get better results if you used some sort of mold in the shape you want the polystyrene to have when done. Because I shaped mine by hand no armor piece has the exact same shape to it.. they all are slightly different, it's noticeable when you put them on top of each other. But I had nothing that was usable as a mold so yeah, freehanded for the win ~

When heat forming I held the armor something like this

Tadaah~

Here's a comparison shot with a shaped armor piece (left) and an untouched piece (right)

I must say that compared to craft foam polystyrene keeps its new shape like mountain while it still remains as bendable as it was before. It's pretty fabulous; you can bend it if you apply some pressure but it will return to its shape when you let go.. unless heated, then it will stay in the new shape obviously. Oh, also, if you bend at some very thin point, like maybe 1 cm wide, then it might snap cleanly if you bend too much. Yes, I tried on a scrap piece and at least mine did snap.. then again it might vary depending on what thickness you have.

I went to cut out the remaining leg armor pieces (except the knee caps) and heat formed them. I gave each of them a somewhat pronounced groove in the middle. Next up was to paint them and again I made myself a makeshift working table ~

All leg armor pieces shaped and ready for painting

I gave them a coating of the same black spray paint I used for the arm guards.

After one coat of spray

I let them dry for the rest of the day because the 0 °C weather slows down the drying process. During the evening I moved my armors from the open "car garage" into the rather old summer cottage standing on our yard... I let them be there overnight.

The following day, also known as yesterday (5th April), when I woke up I went to the summer cottage to take my armors inside for a while... the summer cottage doesn't count as inside because it has broken windows and the door is half loose lol. I let the armors be inside and "warm up" for maybe 30 minutes before going outside to spray the inside of them.

Inside of the armors before painting...

... and after a coat of spray paint.

I let them dry for a few hours and when I went to check I noticed somehow some hairs had managed to get on the armor pieces and gotten stuck between the spray paint coats during the drying. They annoyed me so I peeled them off and...

... the paint around the hairs went with them. Fuck. :)

Oh well, it's the inside so no one will see it anyway.. and it just looks like some sort of damage so it just adds to the believability or something.. come on, Sengoku Basara is a hack 'n slash game series, no one would actually have perfect armor for long when you think about it. xD trolololo ~

After the inside paint had dried I gave the outside a second coating, there was a few spots where the paint wasn't even so yeah. After the painting was done I went to work with the knee caps but I will make a separate blog post about that later because I'm having some trouble with them right now.

Masamune arm guards pt.1

I've been working on the arm guards for Masamune the last few days and figured I could write a progress post now that I'm about half-way into the process. So well, back on last Monday (1st April) I cut out the pieces for the arm guards from craft foam, namely two "bottom" and two "top" parts.

One of the "bottom" parts cut out

With all the needed parts cut out I asked Jäätynyt Enkeli to come help me with the heat forming because hey, two pairs of arms are always better than one. So we went outside and one of us held the craft foam piece in its wanted form while the other one used the heat gun to form it. The first piece we finished looked like this after the heat treatment:

Tadaah ~

And this is what I had after we were done forming them:

Dem shapes ~

I must say craft foam, at least in my case, doesn't hold the shape really well.. it keeps the shape semi-well but I noticed it straightened itself out with time.. at least mine did. *shrugs* Oh well. I didn't do any more progress on Monday.

Yesterday (2nd April) I decided to try using fabric backing for the first time as a way to stiffen, strengthen and support the armor. So I went into the attic to check what fabrics we had that could possibly work; I wanted something smooth, something light-weight that had a bit of stretch. After looking around I found this one very dark blue very soft and nicely flowing knit-like fabric that seemed pretty cool. I took it with me back inside and cut out fitting pieces for the armors, making sure to have some excess just in case.

Fabric backing cut out

I then just took the craft foam armor pieces and glued the fabric on the side that would be against my body, obviously. I used your standard white universal glue and, in my case, that was Erikeeper. I just took a pencil and brushed glue all over the foam and then put the fabric on and pressed it and let it dry. I used a little bit too much glue on the first try because when I was applying pressure the glue "leaked" over the fabric. Well, now when I think about it it's not weird that it did.. the fabric is knit-like after all.. aka small holes. -.- Oh well, it made no difference so no harm done.

Fabric glued to the back side of the craft foam

I did this same thing for all the pieces and after they had dried completely I trimmed the excess fabric away.

Fabric backing to the right

Next step was to seal the craft foam. This step is optional (as well as fabric backing) but I always do it because otherwise you will be spending more paint on the foam because.. well, it's a bit like a sponge or something so it sucks in color a lot. It's better to just seal it because if you do you will get away with fewer coats of paint and posssibly a nicer result as well. Not to mention sealing the craft foam seems to give it a bit more strength too. I use a glue & water mix, aka diluted glue. I just use a normal white glue (Erikeeper, again) and mix it with some water until it's watery enough not to leave any pencil strokes when you brush it on.

Water & glue mix ready to be brushed on

And here's the foam pieces after their first coating, still wet
(you can notice at this point the pieces have lost pretty much all of their curving...)

And the remaining part of yesterday I applied shitlots of coatings; every time the earlier one had dried I put a new one. I think I coated them around 10 times, I'm not so sure, I didn't count. Today I put on a few more glue coats on the morning and then waited until stepdad got back home from a trip to town; he bought me some black spray paint, like I had asked yesterday.

The spray paint in question

I went outside and made a makeshift working table out of small wooden steps and cardboard. I put the foam armor pieces on top of the cardboard.

My makeshift working table ~

I then took the spray paint and shook it for some minutes before I sprayed away.

First coating...

Okaaay... my first reaction was something along the lines of "Oh god why didn't I use a black/white primer?" It's easy to be wise after the event.
I must say the first coating made me scared because the foam didn't seem to take the paint well at all and all sorts of "oh fuck don't tell me it won't work" thoughts appeared in my mind. I then thought that maybe I diluted the glue too much and/or didn't use enough coatings. I don't know, but I got nervous and waited a bit before I tried spraying on a second coating. 

Second coating...

The foam pieces seemed to take in the second coating better but the bright colors still shone through when you looked at them from certain angles and my hopes about this working as well as it had done with earlier projects sunk pretty low. When I looked at them my expression was like:

But I decided to let them dry outside for a while and came back an hour or so later to check. I was not surprised to find out they hadn't completely dried yet...  stupid 0 °C weather, takes forever to dry! Oh well, I decided to spray on a third coating just in case to see if they would turn fully black now.. if not I could just paint them over with an ordinary black paint and then try spray painting on top of that.

Third coating

Okay, my hopes for these arm guards are slowly recovering! I'm not so sure how they will look when dry but at least now the original color doesn't shine through much at all. Currently the pieces are in the sauna drying (mind you, sauna is power off xD) because at this moment it's about to get dark outside and the paint really doesn't dry well in the cold. Oh well, tomorrow I'll see how they have dried. Hopefully the paint will still flex with the foam when dry, it seemed to bend just well without cracking while I tried bending them when they weren't completely dry. Here's to hoping.

More progress later.