Cheap and Easy Foam Knight Shield

I made a shield to go along with the helmet that I made for my son a while back. This project was actually incredibly easy. I sketched out a basic shield shape on a piece of poster-board, and folded it in half to cut it out so that the two sides would be symmetrical.

I had my son hold it up to make sure it was the size (he crushed it a bit, which is why there are creases in the picture). I folded it back in half, and traced it onto an EVA foam flooring mat. This is a thicker foam than the craft foam I used for the helmet (10 mm I think), and holds it's shape better for a large simple item like this. This foam can be bought from Lowe's, Harbor Freight, Amazon, etc., and it looks like large puzzle pieces.

Once I had the half-shape traced onto the foam, I sketched a curved line outside the original straight line, and used this piece as the template for the second foam piece. The convex curve in the middle will cause the final shield to bow outward when the pieces are glued together, giving it a more realistic look than a flat piece of foam would.

I used contact cement to fuse the two pieces together, coating each inner surface with the glue, and waiting 5 - 10 minutes before pressing the two pieces together. You will want to press them firmly, but be careful to align it carefully because this stuff sticks pretty much immediately and is difficult to adjust after the fact.

I traced the outer shape of the shield onto some thin (3 mm?) craft foam and cut out a border for it, gluing it on with more contact cement. I used some more of the craft store brads that were used on the helmet to accent the border of the shield.

I cut out two strips of the 3mm craft foam and glued them in loops on the back of the shield using more of the contact cement to make arm straps.

On to the paint! I gave the shield quite a few coats of plasti-dip to seal the foam, and then hit it with the same hammered steel paint that I used for the helmet.

I did some weathering with black acrylic and silver Rub'N'Buff. I printed out a picture of a dragon that looked kind of cool and cut it out to make a stencil, painting it on with red acrylic.

Quick, easy, and it made my three year old happy. Works for me. Matched up pretty well with the helmet too.

Cheap Kids DIY Knight/Crusader Helmet

Edit: Link to PDF template.

The other day I decided that my three year old son needed a knight helmet for our foam sword fights, so I sketched a pattern on some poster-board, cut it out, and taped it together to make this:

He was loving the new helmet, and played with it a ton, but I figured I could do better. The next day, I took apart the poster-board helmet and used it to make a pattern out of printer paper.

I traced the new template onto some sheets of craft foam (the thicker ones that you can pick up from Michaels - 5mm I think). I cut out two copies of each of the long pieces pictured above, and one circle. I used contact cement to glue the edges together on these pieces. This stuff is great for foam because it gives a great hold immediately upon pushing the two pieces together. You have to spread the cement on each of the surfaces that will touch one another, and then wait around five minutes before pressing the pieces together. The 5mm foam is thick enough that you can apply the cement directly to the edges and it provides a large enough surface to hold together with the glue (which is important on the curves).

Once I had the basic helmet constructed, I drilled some holes on the right side for ventilation and because it looked cool. Then I sealed it with Plastidip (may have been Flexidip this time, but they are pretty much the same thing). The Pastidip/Flexidip is in an aerosol can like spray paint, but it essentially provides a thing rubber coating over the foam. This is important because the foam is very porous, and does not take paint well otherwise (it soaks it up). I also inserted some brads in various places so that they would look like rivets in the helmet (you can get the brads at a craft store like Michaels).

Once the sealant coat dried, I hit with some black primer. You can skip this if you use black Plastidip, but I only had red lying around. Once that dried, I gave it a few coats of a hammered steel spray paint ( I think it was Rustoleum). The hammered metallic paints give the foam a cool weathered texture and look less fake (in my opinion) than the standard metallic paints. After that, I painted some weathering on the edges and crevices with black acrylic and silver Run'N'Buff, and painted an X emblem on the left cheek (my son's name is Xander, so it seemed appropriate.

Here is the foam helmet next to the paper one. Not too bad for a one day build right? Xander seems to like it anyway...

Now I just need to make him a proper knight's sword and shield. I made the shield tonight, hopefully I can get the paint done tomorrow. I am debating whether to keep the X emblem on the shield, or do draw a dragon on there. We will see.

If anyone wants the templates I made, just leave a comment and I will post the pdfs. Keep in mind that they are made for a three year old, so you will have to scale up for a bigger kid or adult. 

Skyrim Alduin Dragon Lamp/Sconce... thing

I recently saw a post on imgur (http://imgur.com/gallery/yrEt3) in which member Immersedn3d had taken the Alduin dragon model from the game Skyrim and modified the head for 3D printing and printed one. It looked pretty freaking cool, so I looked around to see if he had posted his 3D files anywhere and found them on Thingiverse (www.thingiverse.com). I thought it would make a nice wall mounted lamp, so I started 3D printing one on my Makerbot.

After about three days of printing the pieces in translucent PLA, I epoxied it together and started filling, sanding, and painting it.

I drilled a hole through the back of the throat for the wiring and the bulb, and I covered the eyes with painters tape while painting. Since the plastic I printed with was translucent, the eyes would glow when the light was on. I did the base coat in black, and then dry brushed it with a gold to give it an aged bronze-ish look.

I picked up a plaque from Michaels, stained and sealed it, then epoxied the dragon head on it, and was done.

Spiderman Lamp

We recently moved our son from his nursery to a new bedroom to make room for baby #2, and we figured a marvel theme for the new room would be pretty cool. So we got marvel bed sheets, a bunch of wall art, and had the room repainted (Thanks Mom!). Unfortunately, we could find a pull string lamp that we liked (the little guy likes to turn it on and off himself). I figured we could pick up a cheap lamp from target and re-theme it.

The base on the lamp we bought was way too narrow for our son to use with out tipping it over, so I bought a clock base from Michaels, stained it, sealed it with Mod Podge, and bolted it to the existing base.

For the lamp shade, I printed out some Spiderman comics and Mod Podged them over the existing shade.

I thought that it would be cool to set up the pull chain as Spideys web and hang him over the city. I 3D printed some buildings, painted them, and glued them to the base. Then I bought a small Spiderman and glued him to the base of the chain.

Overall, I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

I am Groot!

I meant to post this months ago, but I got a bit sidetracked. For Halloween last year I decided to try something outside of my comfort zone, I have never done any sculpting, molding, or casting before and figured I would give it a shot. What do you think? Am I Groot?

I started by sculpting a Groot head from some clay that I had laying around (thanks Dad!) using some reference pictures that I printed out. Once I was fairly happy with the sculpt, I coated it in silicone to make a mold.

A few coats of silicone later, I added fiberglass to make a mother-mold for rigidity. After awkwardly trying to pour polyfoam into the disassembled mold, quickly putting the concrete cast of my head inside it, and clamping the mold back together - I ended up with a lot of polyfoam all over myself, all over the floor of my basement, and this mask:

As you can see, there are a lot of rough spots that I had to patch up, but overall I was pretty happy with it. After a lot of patching and a little paint, it looked like this:

I had some leftover tinted Plexiglas from an old arcade cabinet, so I cut out a couple of eye sized pieces with a Dremel tool and used a heat gun to give them a curved shaped. I then hot glued them to the inside of the mask so that my eyes would not be visible when wearing it.

I used a different method for the rest of the body. I bought some pipe insulation from Home Depot and cut it into varyious lengths, tapering the ends down to points. Once they were in shapes that I liked, I hot glued them to a turtle neck which I had placed on my duct tape mannequin (this took a LOT longer then I thought it would).

For the chest plates I cut sections of thin EVA foam floor mats into bark-like shapes and used the Dremel tool to carve wood grain patterns into them.

In order to texture the pipe insulation sections I took some non-quilted paper towels and soaked them in a mixture of mod-podge, water, and acrylic paint (I figured the paint could act as a base coat and make later steps a little easier). Once the paper towel strips were soaked, I draped them over each vine striation and crinkled them along the grain line to approximate a bark texture.

Here is a video of a movement test once the first section of textured pieces had dried. It inhibited movement some, but was not too bad (movement got much more difficult once the entire body was covered in the glue towels).

Once the entire thing was textured (which took forever...), I painted the body to match the mask and it looked pretty much like this:

Then I bought some drywall stilts, built some leg extensions out of EVA foam, and then covered and textured them the same way as the rest of the body. Unfortunately, I cannot find any of the progress pictures from that stage. The transition from my legs to foam extensions did not work out as well as I had hoped, so I am going to try to work on improving that this weekend. Thanks for reading!