Monday, October 25, 2010

The Emperor's New Torso (Part II)

The torso is effectively finished!

Finishing it off was tough, which was all down to the chest/shoulder plates. I started out by taking flat cardboard and making a (very) rough shape for the chest plates. I do not have many photos of this, because I wasn't convinced while I was doing it that this would work. I made the shoulder plates separately with the intention of fusing them together with papier mache (since they are supposed to be one piece).



Here is the initial, and admittedly quite shoddy picture of how I started out:






 From there I had to glue it onto the torso, which was quite difficult. Mostly because I was attaching it to an area of the torso which was quite thin. Not entirely trusting superglue to do the job, I turned to epoxy which was messy but did the job well. When it dried I then topped it off with superglue.

This wasn't the last job before applying papier mache, however; I was very unhappy with the quality of the shoulder plates, so I tore them off (thankfully I had only used box-sealing tape up to this point to join them on). I redid them from scratch and once again joined them to the torso. Once this was done, I could apply the papier mache:


Once that dried, with the aid of a hair dryer, I was able to apply the silver paint/red lining:


And that's where I'm at. The torso is done, I have the cape just about finished too thanks to my talented girlfriend. I'll post those up soon. Today being bank holiday Monday means I need to get the bulk of the work done, here's hoping that happens!

No comments:

Post a Comment