Alex B Cosplay: June 2014

Princess Hilda Cosplay Tutorial

At Indy PopCon I got a lot of questions on how I made my armor for my Princess Hilda cosplay.

The explanation was always rather long winded to the point of "sorry I asked."
Honestly, this is the first time I've made anything armor-like. So it was a very trial and error experience for me. But I did take a handful of progress pictures and acquired a very long list of how NOT to make them.

So let me share with you here my process. There may be a few things that I'd do differently having the knowledge I have now just to be more efficient. But I am thrilled with how everything turned out!

The Pauldrons:

Originally I was going to use craft foam to make these pauldrons. Craft foam is great because you can heat it up with a heat gun or over the oven and shape it. It will pretty much hold its shape after it cools. So it should have been easy enough to just heat up and shape around a shoulder. Which would probably work just fine. I was unhappy with the shape though. I wanted more of a rounded bowl-like shape for the pauldrons. So here's what I did:

I went to the Dollar Tree and searched for something that was close to the size and shape I needed.

I found these little toy helmets and cut them up to be more pauldron-y. Then I covered that with craft foam.

I trimmed around the edges and hot glued the craft foam down to the helmet. I'm not sure how necessary this step was. This was just how I did it. The craft foam may have helped give something for the friendly plastic to attach to. Since I didn't try it without the craft foam, I don't know for sure. But the next step was to cover the whole thing in friendly plastic.

Friendly plastic is a plastic that can be heated up and molded into 3 dimensional shapes or used in molds. You may have heard it called "shapelock" or "instamorph" as well. It comes in sticks or pellets. I used pellets for this.

I heated my pellets in a pot of water and then stretched it out and laid it over my pauldron a small piece at a time. After I covered the whole thing it looked like this:

Not too lovely, right?

So I dipped it back in the hot water to heat it up and then rocked it back and forth on a smooth metal pan to flatten and smooth it out. It took a couple hours of doing this on each pauldron before it was smooth enough. This part took a lot of elbow grease and even more patience, but it paid off.

After it was all smooth, I cut the designs on the pauldrons out of craft foam and glued them on. Then I covered the pauldrons in several layers of gesso. I let each layer dry completely and sanded every other layer. It took probably about 7 or 8 layers of gesso before I was happy with it and ready to paint.

Then it was time to paint!

I unfortunately didn't get any progress photos of the armor connectors. The pieces that connected the pauldrons were made with foam board and craft foam. The belt buckle was two different-sized styrofoam balls that I carved and smoothed down. Then I covered it in several layers of light modeling paste and sanded smooth.

The Tassels:

The tassels were made with craft foam. The rings that the tassels are hanging from were made with Amazing Casting Resin. The "X's" in the middle are straws stuck into a ball of friendly plastic and hot glued to the rings.

The Diadem:

And Hilda's diadem is made of resin. Each diamond shape was cast individually with Amazing Casting resing. Then they were attached to a strip of flexible boning (like what you use in corsets) This was just one of those things I had lying around that happened to be perfect for what I needed. The gaps between the diamonds were filled in with light modeling paste and smoothed out.

The jewels were made with Easycast Clear Casting Epoxy. The red ones I colored with resin dye. The others were clear, but I did paint the back side of them gold because they looked really strange when they were just clear.