craft foam scale mail(le) tutorial
so for some reason blackwall has a scale mail(le)* loincloth. idk why, maybe people like to kick him in the balls or something, who knows.
if youâre made out of money and time (time being the same thing as money, so double money or double time, i guess), you can just buy scale making supplies from the ring lord or something, which can be pricey and take a while, or you can try to figure out some other way to do it.
i didnât want to spend like $40 on scales that would look too real next to the rest of my fake foam armor, and i didnât want to spend a billion hours weaving a skirt with rings and little metal pieces, so instead I decided to do it on the cheap and instead of like $40 i paid less than $5 for the materials i used since i had most of it on hand for my other armor, anyway. idk i think it looks just fine and is much less heavy than actual metal would have been. hereâs a closeup.
i own a sillhouette portrait cutting machine i bought on sale from amazon a couple years ago, so i was curious if it would be any easier to do it this way, since i was making the shape in illustrator anywayâŚ
so hereâs what i did:
STEP 1- Vector scale mail(le) shape thing in Illustrator and scale (HAR HAR) it to how big i wanted it to be. the line up the middle is a crease line, which will make more sense later.
STEP 2- figure out how many scales i would need by arranging them in rows.
STEP 3- figure out cutting area i had to work with and arrange scales in rows on artboard.
STEP 4a- export to dxf format so silhouette machine can cut it.
STEP 4b- alternately, you can print scales onto paper to use as a template for tracing and cutting by hand.
(more under the cut so this doesnât get long, including pics of what it looks like finished AND because iâm nice also thereâs a jpg template at the end if you want to trace some scales AND the vector file i used to cut these in case you have a machine and want to make your own.)
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