I recently embellished a prop with peacock eyes. The process was simple, but it requires some trickery that I only learned by screwing up the first attempts.

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The art of patterning costume armor is difficult to teach. For one thing, I'm still a relative newbie to the process, so I don't exactly have a treasure trove of advice to share. Furthermore, said process requires a good understanding of how a 3-D shape can be formed from 2-D surfaces, and such an understanding is best learned by experience. I will try to explain my brief experience in a way that might be helpful to you.

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So my husband wanted to cosplay Xiahou Dun, who wields a large scimitar. Metal was out of the question because it would get us kicked out of a convention faster than you can say DANGER WILL ROBINSON, and I didn't think I would get satisfactorily smooth results from bare wood. (Also, I feared that wood that thin would have a nasty tendency to break in half at an inopportune time, especially when being bumped around by a big ogre like my husband. Let's just say that ogres have +20 strength, -20 dexterity.)

I'd known that fiberglass is an excellent material for reinforcing props, but I also heard that it was toxic and stinky and ZOMG TEH EVIL. And then I came across this top-notch tutorial for applying a smooth, light fiberglass laminate to model airplane wings - flat, thin pieces of wood, much like my sword blade. I also remembered that my good friend Zeriel had taken an aerospace engineering lab involving extensive, anally precise fiberglass work. Work that he enjoyed and was happy to help others with.

Thus, a project was born.

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I'll spare you the excruciating details of the massive waste of time that was my attempt to fiberglass armor and claws for my Zhang He costume. With time running out before Otakon 2005, I thought I would revisit something that I had never thought would work for me - craft foam propmaking. I'd come across Amethyst Angel's famous craft foam and styrene tutorial, but that technique and I just did not get along. First off, I didn't like having to bend the piece properly in a single step. More importantly, hot glue hates me. It dribbles and burninates my fingers and doesn't seem to find a middle ground between warping the plastic laminate layer and having near zero holding power.

I then remembered that I had seen absolutely fantastic armor made out of some sort of fun foam-like material, and I'd also forgotten about another tutorial in which the author simply sealed their shaped craft foam and painted it. I bought some more foam, fired up the stove, and went to work, and I was very happy with the results. I was in too much of a hurry to take progress pictures, but I remembered the process well. Hopefully, these basic instructions for foam propmaking should help you if you wish to make something similar.

I've updated some parts of this article to include what I've learned by doofing up my latest foam project: redone Zhang He armor and peacock talon weapons, which I wore at Otakon 2006.

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