Iron Man, details & extras..

In my last post, I gave a quick overview of how I built my 2012 Iron Man costume.. but it grew rather long, and I decided to leave a few bits to have their own post.. After all, much of the last post wouldn't be particularly new material to anyone who follows the RPF threads on foam armor builds.. but maybe some of this post may be useful.. 

Read on for more info on tasty costumey details =)

The 2012 Halloween Costume..

This years began when I found about pepakura, a neat little subculture making little models by paper folding.. which has been adopted by a different group that reused the approach to build replica armor from movies.. think Stormtrooper outfits, etc.

I thought about this way back in March or so, and started work on a test piece, to see how it might work out.. There were plenty of people discussing it over in the forums, but the main approach used fiberglass & resin, & required care not to poison yourself with fumes / dust.. I wasn't so keen on that part, as most of my work is done in an indoor living space.

I tried an alternate approach to strengthening.. with reasonable results, then found an approach using high density foam flooring tiles.. these just needed cutting, glueing, and painting.. surely I could do that.. right ? ;p

Well.. it's now October, and I'm done.. the build took around 3 months worth of weekends, with it getting quite busy toward the end, working most evenings as well.. I suspect starting a month earlier would have been a better idea ;p

So.. Here's the final result..

And now.. here's how it got to this stage..

Very Dotty Bird

My first attempt at drawing a LadyBird outfit didn't go too well..

Just because you can have red with black dots, and black with red dots, doesn't mean every surface should have both ;p

This design was useful though, just to help me realize I wasn't a fan of those Disney style puffball shoulders.

UFO ?

As an alternative to the Bumble Bee look, I drew up this 50s SciFi inspired UFO costume.

Aim here was to give that round elliptical UFO shape, and to continue it up into the body.. the shoulders & torso are given a puffed out shape.

The cuffs are intended to be just flat discs, like you'd see on the end of the Ray Gun, or Tesla lightning conductors.