Aymeric Armor/foam process! (Patreon)

Hey guys! Sorry for the delay on this but here it is, part one of my Aymeric tutorial!

The very first thing I started on was his gloves! I cut out the basic shapes out of 2mm craft foam! All of the foam for this cosplay was primed with Plasti dip and all the gold accents were painted with gold leaf Rub n Buff and silver leaf Rub n Buff for...well the silver parts! Make sure you work in a well ventilated area when working with rub n buff because it does emit some fumes!

For the top part of the gloves to get the designs etched into it, I took a heat wand and began drawing onto it where I wanted my details to be at! A lot of this was my own interpretation of his armor, so feel free to go about the details however you wish! This was made with your average 9x12 sheet of craft foam!

Everything was adhered to the the sleeves/gloves with super glue! In my next tutorial I will go over how I made these sleeves!

All of these armor foam pieces were all just free handed/patterned by me! I will make a separate post for the armor patterns, cause I still have to finish drawing them out and theres a lot of them ahahah. But all of this was made with regular craft foam sheets or 2mm craft foam! For the raised details I used foam clay to build atop of the armor base and let it dry for 48 hours before doing anything else to them. All the etching of the details was made the same way as the gloves, etched in with a heat wand.

For his neck dragon piece, I took some crumpled up aluminium foil and made my base, from there I then wrapped everything in duct tape! After, I took some saran wrap and wrapped it once more, I then tapped over the satan wrap with some clear tape. After cutting a seam line down the middle and back of it to get my pattern I proceeded by cutting darts all around my new pattern, this will help the foam keep its curves later. I pinned down my pattern to some 2mm craft foam and traced the pattern to the foam. After, I cut out the foam and glue it down to my original base with some contact cement. After that dried I took my heat wand and began to etch in the scales and other details onto the foam. I used foam clay in order to patch my seams and for the large horns sticking out I took some normal craft foam and EVA foam, sandwiched it together with some contact cement, sanded the sides down to a point and adhered those to the foam base with some super glue!

I will have the drawn out patterns out later this week but, for the pauldrons I first drew out my pattern onto some stiff felt and tested how those looked on me first, after some adjustments they were ready to go! I took my felt patterns and transferred them to craft foam!

All of the foam was covered with a thermoplastic called thibra! Thibra is like worbla but its SUPER smooth but extra hard to work with, I used this cause it leaves a really nice finish and would make the metalics on the armor shine really well! I did this all atop foam because thibra does not stick to foam, so when using it on foam you have to make sure the thibra curves around the edges of your project so it can hold its shape.

Everything was then primed with plasti-dip!

And then it was painted!! I used a base of gold/silver rub n buff and with a mix of brown, black and orange acrylics I weathered every single piece!

The larger pieces like the top and bottom parts were attacked with some lines of velcro and the smaller ones were attached with fabric-tac and super glue! I wanted the larger pieces to be attached with velcro so I could adjust/take them off when they started to get in the way.

And that was my process on making the armor pieces for Aymeric!! I am sorry I don't have a lot of pictures for this, I was rushing a bit towards the end due to my short deadline but I hope something here helped you in anyway!