Hey, sorry it's been so long since my last post. I had actually meant to put this up earlier along with pics of the finished 'secret project' but I accidentally forgot to take pictures of the secret project. So I've been waiting for pics from the twins I gave it to, but they went on a short vacation and were unable to send me pics. I'll post those in the next post, I suppose. Anyway! The Thunder Edge:
Current Progress: 50% or so
Alright, so this is what I have so far. The first thing I did was get materials! I went out to Home Depot to buy my base material, Insulation Foam. (I actually prefer Lowes, but Home Depot was the only place in my area that sold the kind of foam I wanted. =/) The one that I picked up was of the Owens Corning brand and its product name is 'Foamular.' They come in various sizes and thickness but the kind that my Home Depot had were these huge 1/2 inch sheets for about 11 or 12 dollars.
Second, I bought some posterboard which I have seen others use as a sort of spine or the foam to stick to for support. I printed out the template I had already drawn of the Thunder Edge on several sheets of paper and traced the design onto the posterboard. It took two sheets to make sure it was the full length. Hahahaha.... I also bought some Bondo, but I'll get to that more in depth later.
I then cut out and traced that template onto the insulation foam, making two copies. One for each side of the poster board. Oh, and you can see my very first Thunder Edge on the top of the photo. One single piece of styrofoam usually used for floral arrangement, made without any reinforcement, and was also shorter than what I wanted. I don't recommend using it for large props such as this, but I've found that it works great for smaller accessories, such as novelty sized beads. Oh, and by the way, insulation foam comes covered in this plastic film. You'll want to remove that before doing anything with the foam.
Here is another picture to show the pieces ontop of each other along with the piece of poster board in the middle. Oh, there is also a yard stick in there for comparison. The whole prop is about 51 inches long, I had meant for it to be 50 but the computer skewed the proportions when I blew up my drawing. =/
And here's one final picture of what I have so far. It's a picture of the cloud shaped piece that is meant to float in the hole in the middle of the glaive. I made the piece using the shame process as the sword, by gluing posterboard between two pieces of foam. I've decided to mimic the floating effect by tying fishing line (which is transparent!) to holes I've made in the posterboard in both the cloud and sword pieces. I reinforced the hole areas by gluing together more pieces of poster board. You can kinda see the fishing line in the photo, I'm actually holding up a piece. Can't see it? Good! That's the point!
Oh, I forgot to mention, I cut out the details in the foam using my Dremel Rotary Tool on it's low speed setting. (Don't own a Dremel? Get one! It is my favorite and, in my opinion, my most versatile/usefull tool. =) ) There was also an odd gap where the various layers of poster board and poster board met, I decided to try out my newly acquired Bondo, the all-purpose type, to fill in the gap. It wasn't really worth it, it was difficult to work with and I ended up with a lot of unused material since I was only filling in a small space. One thing I learned though was to never use bondo on unprimered foam, it doesn't stick well. But, it did the job and it was a learning experience. I covered the whole thing in a layer of gesso. It needs another 1 or 2 and a good sanding, but once that's done it'll look awesome. =)
The next step, after finishing the cloud piece, is to attach it to the main sword piece. Then glue the whole thing together and finish shaping it. I look forward to seeing the finished product, and I hope ya'll do to.
Signing out,
Solvash
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