Shiva Nix Cosplay

Shiva merupakan salah satu karakter Monster Summon yang ada di seri Final Fintasy. Biasanya muncul sebagai sosok berwarna biru. Di dalam Final Fantasy XIII, Shiva muncul sebagai sepasang saudara kembar, Styria dan Nix. Kostum untuk Shiva yang satu ini cukup rumit, terutama untuk bagian kepalanya. Namun saya rasa cukup worthed kalau hiasan kepalanya dapat dibuat ^^. Buat yang mau membuat bagian kepalanya dan juga roda yang menjadi senjatanya, silahkan dilihat tutorialnya.

tutorial pembuatan bagian kepala: http://hexreedfly.deviantart.com/gallery/?3698981#/d2w210j

tutorial pembuatan roda: http://hexreedfly.deviantart.com/gallery/?3698981#/d2w3ssl

About my love to expanding foam

In the last time there were a lot of people who asked me how I create my expanding form figures and and it is just amazing that these people came from all over the world! It's great to hear that you guys like my technique so much and want to try it by yourself. So I want to make it easy for you and try to explain something about my work with this awesome material.

At first: I use expanding foam from cans and I always choose the cheapest ones. My home depot is "Obi", but expanding foam is a base material for home building so you'll find it in every other home depot.

Better buy too much than too less cans. I mostly buy something between 5 and 10 cans and hope that it will be enough for the next days, he he. Shake it well before you start to work with and cover your ground with a sheeting or something else. You will be not happy when you get this stuff on your clothes, your carpet or your floor.
Then, you have to know that it can be difficult to find the right form in the carving progress. It's easier if you have a help. I draw my form on card board, cut it out and then I cover it with expanding foam.

You have to wait some hours until the foam gets dry and you are able to carve it. If you spray a bit water at the foam then this process will be accelerate.
When it's finally dry you can go to work. For carving I use normal cutter like this:

It's better to buy cheap ones and a lot of them. Sometimes I need about 10 or 20 cutter for a project, because I cut in foam when is still not dry inside and the cutter gets dirty and sticky. I clean them after half an hour or change them because they are not sharp anymore after too much carving.

When you start with carving try to carve a clean surface at first. Try to find your final form and search for the grey board inside. I cut some time as deap as I can inside of the foam and then I cut everything I not need away. It's better to split a complicated form in more work steps. As you can see I also carved at first only the head of my staff.

Then I added further foam to carve the horns and the spikes on it's back. Here my fault was, that I was just too lazy to add some card board inside of the new foam. So it was a bit hard to find the right way to carve it. Later I noticed, that I also need card board for stabilisation. The foam itself is very breakable and for smaller parts a finishing layer of newspaper and paper mache wouldn't be enough to save it from damage.

Here you see the finished carved foam. I guess I needed about 10 cans for this result. Mostly only 30 % of your sprayed foam is for your prop itself. The rest is dirt. A lot of dirt!

He he, I don't like trash bags so much. :)

Here is a other example for the right use of card board inside:

You'll find card board inside of the eagle head and the spikes. By carving such little details it's almost impossible to disclaim for help.

If you're done with the carving step we have to speak about the 3 final layers to save the foam inside: Masking (or painters) tape, pieces of newspaper and paper mache.

Here you see all 3 layers. But why do you need them?
Masking tape (or crepe tape or painters tape... oh, I hope I finally found the right english meaning!) covers the holes in the expanding foam and gives you a surface to work with. Layers of news paper parts give it a strong, solid and protecting coat. And paper mache makes your surface smooth or give you the chance to carve details or to model something. But try to find your final form while the carving process of the exanding foam. The better your base is, the less you need to model with paper mache and the less is the weight of your prop!

Don't save time for the news paper layer and be sure that it's the most important one!

And be sure, that the paper mache layer will need also a lot of time. I use a hot air gun to accelerate the dry process, but you have to take care if you use it, too. Too much heat and you'll get ulgy air holes inside of your paper mache. So blow-dry a bit until the paper mache gets white (it's grey when it's still wet), then wait until the water inside make it's grey again and keep on drying again. When your prop is finally covered complete with paper mache you can sand it and search for mistakes you have to correct. I use for sanding sand paper and a Delta sander. Then sand and sand and sand and add some details if you want to:

And after some time and patience you can finally paint your prop! Have fun! :)




I hope you understood everthing and if you still have questions feel free to ask!

Bring some light in your life!

Today I want to show you a further tutorial: How to add lights to your costume! (And I have to warn you: This time it was really hard for me to translate this tutorial from german!)

I guess, I'm not the only one who believe that lights in costumes and props are awesome. And I guess that a lot of you are afraid of the seeming difficutly or the missing of know how. After trying it by myself I want to show, how easy it is!

 The basics: There are a parallel and a serial connection. If you need up to 3 LEDs it would be better to use a serial cconnection, so you can use your power in the best way. If you need more then 3 LEDs you should use the parallel connection. With this you can use more LEDs but you also need more energy.

Take a look the the circuits:

Serial connection: (Sorry for the german words, the pictures are out of my german blog. "Schaltkreiselement" means circuit element)

Parallel connection:

What is important?
The problem is, that LEDs are built just for a special amount of voltage. Too much damange them. If you take a LED which tolerate only 3.5 V and you use a 9 V battery, then you have to kill the 5.5 V which are too much for the LED. So you have to use a fitting resistor, which absorbs the rest of the voltage. And sure you need a different resistor, if you use for example 2 LEDs, because they need more voltage. It's always depends of the amount of the LEDs, their forward voltage and the battery you use. But I don't want to paint you with theorie. I hated thist already in school. We make it very easy:
Resistor calculator
Download this programm and be happy! I always use this to calculate my resistors and it works great! And if you don't like it, google for another. There are a lot of them!

Now, what should you do, if you need more then 3 LEDs? 5 of them would need  17.5 V but a battery have only 9 V. The solution is a parallel connection. Look at my example:

You see, there are two parallel connections and every of them get 9 V, so you can use more LEDs. But like I said, if you use more LEDs, then you need more energy and your battery will be empty faster.

Now we're starting with the practice!

What do you need?
- LEDs
-  Resistors
- Switches
- Batteries
- Battery boxes
- Wire
- Solder
- Soldering iron
- Shrinking hose
- Hot air blower
- And tools like cutter, pincers or knife
- Maybe a pinboard too, because to can test your circuits before soldering it

Here is a little picture:

By the way: All of this stuff is very cheap and it's really worth to spent this money for the finish result. Only the tools like a soldering gun can be a bit expensive. But maybe your parents or your friends can help you out!

Now, thing about how many lights and how much money you will need. Enter the date about your LEDs in the resistor calculator and prepare your workspace. Then we can start!

At the beginning you have to isolate the copper wire inside of your wire. I used a carpet cutter and cut a bit in the first 2 centimeter of the wire. Be very careful and don't damage the copper wire. Then draw the rubber off the wire and drill the copper a bit.

Now put a bit of the shrinking hose about both of your isolated wire ends. It's very important, that the isolated wires don't touch each other later so use enough hose to protect them. You'll see, that the LED have a long and a short "leg". The short one needs a negative pole (black wire) and the long one a positive (red wire). (The color of the wire doens't matter, but then it's easy for you to find the right pole.)

Now take your isolated wire, drill it at the leg (take care for the right pole!) and solder it with some brazing solder together.

Then you have to put the shrinking hose about the soldered part and heat it with your hot air blower.

When all of your LEDs are connected you have to test the lenght of your wires. Put your connection on your prop or costume, maybe reduce them and then keep on working.

If you have to connect some wires you can try it like in this picture. Drill their ends togeher, use some brazing solder, shrinking hose and your soldering gun. If you use a parallel connection you have to connects same poles with each other and if you use a serial connection you have to connect different poles together. Just look at my examples.

At the end you have to insert your resistor. It doesn't matter if you put it at the end or at the beginning of your connection. The poles are also not important. You only have to isolate it well (I covered the whole resistor and it's contacts with shrinking hose.)
Then only the switch and the battery box is missing.

I used a cheap 3 pole toggle switch. Here you need one of the left or the right legs one middle one. Connect them well and use enough shrinking hose. When you connect your battery box you also have to take care for the poles, but here you can just look at the right colors. By the way, this long, black thing is my resistor. And then... when everythink is correctly and well soldered...

...It glows!
You see, it's really not so difficult and with a bit of patience there will be no problems. Also you don't need to be a ingeneer. And if you have questions, feel free to ask!

I hope, you like my tutorial and I could help or inspire you a bit!