His Brother's Keeper - Crafting a Diablo Crusader Shield

Blizzcon is over, and with Blizzcon comes amazing cosplay. This year, I wanted to be the Crusader from the concept art for Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls. Unfortunately, I didn't get the armor fitted properly in time, so I couldn't wear full gear. I did, however, still get to walk in my favorite pieces: the shield, which I call His Brother's Keeper, and the double-headed flail, which I call Great Vengeance and Furious Anger.

My greatest mistake this year was in succumbing to the pressure to be competitive. I found myself struggling to finish pieces that I wasn't completely satisfied with the quality, and that were untested before I discovered they didn't actually fit me. It should be obvious, but the work that I wasn't enjoying also didn't turn out as well as things I had fun with. Parts of the costume were a chore, and they suffered. My great successes were in the shield and the flail, which had their challenges, but I loved making them and I love the results. These are the lessons to carry forward.

Please enjoy a gratuitous amount of photographs of the shield build, and a few of the flail as well, with a few comments by me...

The shield main body after being palm-sanded and heat-knifed from a 72x48x6-inch block of pink foam. Those frustrated gouges from the heat knife would eventually become cool battle damage. 

I figured a huge shield that spends a lot of time with its tip in the dirt could use a replaceable leather shoe for protection. I made this by templating the shield's tip with aluminum foil and duct tape, and transferring that to EVA. I then hand-stitched the two pieces with upholstery piping and reënforced it with hot glue.

I made a lot more templates for this costume, like this paper template for the frontispiece. When in doubt, I would start measuring things and seeing how elements in the art compared to each other, and then I would usually find the solution.

Here's the kite with the shoe and a 2mm craft foam overlay. The divots are meant to simulate a hammered effect on the bronze. The hammering is a bit aggressive, but it was done with a Dremel tool and a 1/2-inch grindstone, individually, by hand.

The typical way I've seen to give support to costume shields id to have a strong layer sandwiched between layers of foam. Since my shield is carved from a single block of foam, this wasn't an option. So I drilled 1.5-inch holes down through the body of the kite and installed to pieces of PVC piping, cut to fit flush to the shield's surface. The PVC was slathered generously with epoxy to make it stick.

The pipe then served as a mount point for bolts and washers, which were held rigid with expandable foam. As far as I can tell, I haven't seen this method before, and it worked fabulously. I flung this shield around my arm all day and noticed not the slightest amount of tearing around these mounts. If it's appropriate for your project, give it a try.

The bolts let me mount this martial arts foam bracer, which acted as my arm band. This eventually was too weak to hold the final weight of the shield, but I thought it was pretty smart at the time.

Here's my crude flail handle: PVC cap, corner molding, wood dowel, a banister topper, wood glue, epoxy, a screw, and a large ring bolt, all from Home Depot.

The cuff wasn't enough to make the shield wearable, so I installed a PVC handle using the same method as before. Easy peasy.

The shield at its current weight of 6 pounds was quite comfortable. This would change in time...

This small belt sander was a boon for shaping the cross frontispiece, made from four layers of EVA that I stacked and sculpted (not unlike myself -_^ )

Rough mockup of the assembled shield for heat-knife battle damaging. I wanted to have the pieces together so that gashes that hit the kite and the cross would match up. At this point I still thought I was going to paint each piece separately. Nope...

Two pieces epoxied together, after a coat of Plastidip that I didn't like.

After a coat of Epsilon plastic coating. The divots on the kite ate up a lot of the Epsilon, so I wound up with not quite enough in the bottle for two full coats all over. I gave it what I could.

Primer white spray.

Here's the flattened craft foam applique that would go on the flail heads. I came up with the design by joining images from Tyrael's sword, with a bolt of energy striking an image of Diablo, and that energy is passing through the bodies of the Crusaders. I wanted to give the basic iron flail a little flash and I think this turned out great.

Bronze spray paint with a dry-brushing of copper.

Great Vengeance and Furious Anger

I used a craft burning tool to take this image from the Book of Tyrael and put it on leather. This leather would be my handle-wrap for the flail.

Here's the wood-tone paint job on the back of the shield. There are loads of tutorials on YouTube for painting a faux wood look to your needs. I feel this paint job was a huge step up from the Training Dummy armor.

Remember those big, nasty gashes? I imagined those as the result of some big, flaming claws or blades or something horrible, and I turned them into fire damage. Rough brushing and buffing of some grey and black craft paint, making sure to get deep in the cracks.

With this giant piece of wood, why not a little carving to remind you of your sweetie back home? For this I Dremelled through the paint job with an etching bit, then painted over in a light tan and towelled off the excess. Töbayaz + Molly.

Gold spray on the cross. Easy job, but the masking is tricky.

Back to the other side to paint the iron supports. I used a hammered iron spray paint and dry brushed a little grey over the rivets.

Back to the other side, getting ready to paint the shoe.

Full paint, with a faux leather finish on the shoe. The faux leather technique is pretty fun: basically lay down a light color glaze, then layer on on eor two darker glazes, and while that dark color is on you mash crumpled-then-uncrumpled sheets of plastic wrap on it to get the wrinkles.

Full paint on the back.

My gem turned out pretty rough in the front, but here's the acrylic rods that I set while it was forming. This gave the gem a secure post to socket it into the shield's face.

By now, the shield was too heavy for the martial arts cuff to be useful, so I switched to these leather tool belts. I trimmed them, and they mounted beautifully to the shield. With a little darker paint to match, and an EVA cuff for support, the held the weight of the shield. Really, I'm pretty impressed with how tough the whole rig is.

A couple with the gem in place, Queen-size hotel bed for comparison.

Finally, a couple costume selfies! Here I'm wearing a modified costume out of the pieces that worked, basically so that I can show off this beautiful shield and flail.

I really did love making this shield. Turns out at around 12-15 pounds, it's a bitch to carry. Even if I had made a working set of armor, I doubt I could have held it all together all day. I probably won't revisit this costume without major modifications, but I take satisfaction in knowing that I built what I wanted, and in some ways it was even better than I had imagined.

What I'm Playing:

• Main Campaign: Diablo 3, Hearthstone
• Side Quest: Steamworld Dig, The Binding of Isaac

Epsilon Application

I've been working on a Diablo 3 Crusader costume for the upcoming BlizzCon, and today marked a big day for the build: I managed to get a layer of Epsilon coating onto the front side of my shield. Since this was my first time working with the material, I thought I'd share a few notes and pictures.

What you see above is a shield made of pink insulation foam and an EVA foam cross, which I've covered with Epsilon that was tinted blue for visibility. It took a couple hours to put on, and I worked in sections starting with the entire cross and then going around the body of the shield. 

Epsilon is a two-part epoxy coating by Smooth-On made for foam projects. It contains no solvents, so it won't dissolve foam on application. The end result is a piece that's easy to sand and paint, and has a hard plastic shell that protects it from impact. It's available online, but I happened to pick mine up at the Reynolds Advanced Materials in North Hollywood. 

The stuff mixes easily, but you have to work fairly quickly as it will start to gum up after 10 to 15 minutes. At one point I think I was too hasty in mixing, and the material went through a very noticeable exothermic reaction and cured into a useless glob. 

My shield is covered with divots intentionally, and it was tough to determine exactly how much Epsilon I would need to cover the surface area, but this application took up all of a trial-size pack. My coating is a bit uneven, and I'm sure I didn't make most efficient use of the material, but I think I still got the end look that I wanted. Once this side cures to a non-tacky state over the next two hours, I'll flip it over and do the much smoother back side.

All in all I think Epsilon is a cool material and I look forward to testing the hardness of the finished piece. With the glue-like consistency, I also liked how well it smoothed over unsightly gaps in the construction. I've seen some other people cover their EVA armor in this stuff and then be disappointed at the lack of flex afterwards; for me, the rigidity is a feature, not a bug.

I'll keep you all posted either on my cosplay Facebook page as to the final result!

What I'm Playing:

• Main Campaign: P.T., Rogue Legacy
• Side Quest: Shovel Knight

Blizzcon Costuming: It Begins Again

It seems that my Blizzcon cosplay choices essentially derive from whatever Triple A Cosplay dares me to do. At dinner following PAX Prime last year, Mario happened to show me the concept art for the Diablo 3 Crusader and his car door of a shield. I'd say it's more like a refrigerator door. I knew he would be my next big project.

I've started work on the Concept Crusader, starting with the shield. I feel like this is the biggest, hardest, most important piece to get right, and if it fails, I want it to fail before a lot of effort and resources are put in other areas. I'll be posting progress shots all the way up to November, and here comes the first, early batch!

It's tough to see, but this is the first drawing of the shield on brown paper. I looked at how many inches apart were some of the key details on the shield in the art, and scaled those measurements up to six feet by three feet. I drew out the left side first, then cut that and folded the paper over to ensure symmetry. Seeing the shield on this scale was daunting. I had been up late and was punchy, and I almost convinced myself that this whole thing is too big and I shouldn't bother. But then I remembered that everything on the Crusader is ridiculously oversized and that's why it's awesome. Feeling reäligned, I pressed on.

The paper shield template, with a yardstick for scale.

For ease of transfer to foam, I traced the paper template on coroplast. Cardboard would be just as good, this is just the material that I happened to have around and fit my needs for size. Utility knife for scale.

I traced the shape out onto EVA foam mats. I bought the colored ones because the black ones at Home Depot had a textured side that was too bumpy. Plus, these are more fun, right?

One layer trimmed.

Both layers trimmed. I'm also going to acquire a harder material to be the core, and these foam layers will be on the outside. I seriously considered not painting the final product. I'll be very happy knowing how colorful my shield is on the inside.

The finished shield has some interesting bends, so I built this frame to help me bend the foam. Nothing special, just pegs cut from a 3/4-inch dowel and hammered into a wooden cross. No religious significance intended. I decided I wanted a 6-inch thrust *ahem* on the highest and lowest points on the shield, and referred back to the shield's major features to determine where that should drop to a 2-inch thrust. The wings of the shield will fall on the outer arms of the cross, essentially giving them a 0-inch thrust. Hope it works...

What I've Been Playing:

• Main Campaign: Diablo 3
• Side Quest: Hearthstone

The Patient Warrior - Costuming the Training Dummy

Hi all! A week ago today I was in recovery from Blizzcon. I'm sure a lot of exciting things happened, but I could hardly tell because I was in costume. But that was pretty awesome on it's own, truth be told. I went as a Training Dummy, which in World of Warcraft is an inanimate combat partner for you to test yourself against in-game. The concept came up at a post-Blizzcon dinner a couple years ago and I immediately wanted to do it. So here's a few pictures and words to show what I got myself into...

Here is the Training Dummy in the game. It will wear a different colored banner depending which faction it belongs to, Alliance or Horde. My dummy wears a blue alliance banner since my friends and I play Horde. While this thing is built like a telephone pole, I wanted to be mobile, so the project quickly evolved into a sort of dummy-themed suit of armor.

An early resource I used was Bill Doran's N7 armor project, which uses EVA foam mats and transforms them into armor pieces from Mass Effect. The templates gave me a perspective on how big individual pieces needed to be, and how I should change the shaping for my purposes. This was my first time working with EVA, and while I made plenty of mistakes, I still learned a lot and quickly grew to love the material.

Here is an early heat-shaping test with the foam. The upper piece was shaped with a heat gun, which I found difficult to get an even spread on large pieces. I much preferred an oven, set to 250 degrees F for 5-10 minutes. The foam gets very pliable, and you can still shape it with your hands. When it cools, it gets very rigid, but you can still cut and even re-shape it. You have to use a piece smaller than your oven, because if the piece is too big it will trap all the heat and burn. The good thing is burnt EVA is still really easy to clean off an oven grate.

Turns out raccoons love EVA foam. Watch out if you leave stuff outside overnight.

Here are some shaped and glued arm pieces. I wanted to have ones that go all the way around, but I measured wrong. Instead of doing a new piece, I put in a spacer and covered up the gap with masking tape. Really slapdash work, but it held at least.

The Dremel sander really rips through this stuff, a bit more than needed. I had better results on edge work with a power sander. The Dremel is pretty awesome at making pokes and gashes that look like weapon damage.

Here are some pieces with their first coat of paint on a drying rack I made. The wood graining technique uses two colors of paint, a base and a darker detail. The detail coat goes on thick and wet, and you scrape bits of it away with paint combs and a rocker comb. I found these combs in Home Depot under the Martha Stewart line. I also found a really helpful tutorial.

The game dummy has a bit of broom stuck on his head, but I wanted a mowhawk. I took a broom and cut the straws off, then I poked holes in a strip of foam and stuffed the straws in like hair plugs. That all got locked down with hot glue. I lined the bottom with fleece, and that served as a structural member for my hood.

Here's a paint test where you can see the various effects of different combs and the rocker. The rocker takes some finesse to get used to, but it produces a great effect when you do it properly. Also, wood grain isn't perfect, so I remembered not to be too precious about how it looked. The amount of imperfection that served to improve this build was quite liberating. Here are some finished armor pieces...

Here is my sword progress. I used a 2-foot PVC pipe as the core, and surrounded it with pink insulation foam. Once the spray glue had everything together, I sat in the driveway with my sander and whittled out a sword. Again, where there were imperfections, I cut them out with a drywall saw and made it look like weapon damage.

Finished shield and breastplate, with silver paint. I thought the pentagonal shield on the model was boring, so I made mine to look like a section from a wine barrel. Wine barrels served as a major design touchstone on this build.

My shield handle: a metal gate handle from Home Depot. I stuck on perfectly with Gorilla Glue, and the screws even went into the foam to complete the detail.

This rope collar was stressful. I wrapped manilla rope around a cardboard shipping tube using a spiral hitch, then covered it with silicone sealant. When it's all together, the wrapping slips off and holds shape. You can even peel off layers if you made too much. I then sliced it lengthwise with a razor, and thankfully it still held. I mounted it to some elastic and Velcro and patched some of the holes with hot glue. This may have been my most rugged piece.

Here's a test wear of the burlap hood. Besides eye holes, some trimming is needed so I don't look like a BDSM kitty cat.

The banner cape, made by Tina, grommeted and held by some more rope work. I thought I would need Velcro to hold this in place, but it actually stayed in place very well.

                                      

Finished and painted hood. I used a plastic mask from Michael's to align the hood's eyeholes with my eyes.

Full armor test wear. This turned out to be critical, as areas where I had glued Velcro to paint quickly failed. After some re-gluing, things were better.

Things still weren't perfect, though. The Velcro on my pack piece failed at Blizzcon and I had to do emergency repair. I nixed the back armor since it was one of my worst pieces and nobody could see it anyway. I superglued my chest and torso together and held them up with scrap burlap, which I actually think looks better. The costume was a little easier now to sit in, but I couldn't bend over. But it held.

And here's the whole thing!

And here's one from Eurobeat Kasumi Photography. Thank you so much!

What I've Been Playing:

• Main Campaign: Pokémon Y
• Side Quest: Resogun, Contrast