I actually finished this step a couple weeks ago but was too busy to post with con prep, so here it is now!
In this edition were getting the EVA foam together. I got a big ole cutting board before starting for about 7 quid so its easier to cut out the large shapes.
We got ourselves the paper pattern to trace and slightly edit. Drop that sucker on the foam. And start cutting.
For the eyes I am planning to have them domed. Which means I got these googly eyes im going to deface to steal the plastic dome from.
Cutting the circle was honestly the most nerve-wracking part of this, and I did it in 4 segments just to be as careful as possible.
I wouldng exactly call cutting the EVA foam easy tbh. I was using mainly 10mm super high density foam as the base structure. That is to make sure that the base head is strong and isnt going to warp during movement. My exacto knife wasnt entirely... long enough to cut through it in one go, and I wouldnt say I was strong enough to do that even if it could lol. My arm and hand hurt afterwards, and theres some parts that came out a little crooked.
A lot of EVA sculptors cut their edges at an angle, and honestly, i was too scared to do that and mess up the angle with how *rough* cutting this already was. So I opted for just simple straight edges. I probably shouldve added some extra space here or there and thought about the fact this foam is 10mm thick. But oh well.
Whats important is its cut and we can move onto gluing.
Now we could use hot glue, or super glue. But the recommendation from Pros is Contact Cement. So thats what were gonna use.
Honestly this was pretty easy. You mark one side and swipe it down evenly with a scrap piece, you leave it to dry for like a minute or two, do the second piece where the first is gonna connect. Let that dry. Then put the two pieces together. Revolutionary shit im telling you. The bond is so damn strong too im shook.
Theres several parts I wasnt too happy about though. The top and longest piece wasnt long enough and ill need to compensate for it later. And some cuttings werent identical like I wanted. The biggest issue was the fact I didnt take into account the thickness of the foam overlapping at the jaw. So its. Well it doesnt exactly fit right now. But that will be fixed with sanding. A lot of sanding.
Youre probably looking and pointing at the black pieces of foam too. Thats 4mm low density foam. I wanted it for building details.
For the horn I ran into the problem of it possibly being heavy. And with its placement, it needs to be *light*. Initially I was going to use three pieces of 10mm high density foam. But that sucker weighed about 70 grams together. Thats. A lot. To be put on the tip of the mask.
You may be quick to suggest to carve out two pieces of low density foam as the horn, bend it, and make it hollow. And to that I say: im not experienced enough with eva foam to do that and also i dont want it to get crushed inside a luggage into a deflated Thing.
So i tried to weigh up the difference between the low and high density. And it turns out i can just use 2 pieces of low density foam that equal the size of the high density one, but it weights *half as much*. So instead i used high density as the core of the horn, surrounded by 4 pieces of low density. Which reduced the horn to about 40 grams! Yippe!!
And with it all put together... it is super blocky. And i am dreading figuring out how to sand it, and actually make it wearable.
