Tools of the Halo Trade
Oooooh man I should have done this ages ago. Basically a lot of people now have asked me what things I use to make my armour so here’s a giant post about just that. The way I build has changed so much in just under a year so it’ll probably change more as I find more and better materials...here is the jist for now.
Just standard scissors and stanley knife for cutting the foam. The Stanley Knife I use is great! It’s got a lot of blades that you can use pliers to snap the blades off and yay it’s sharp all over again.
This is a glue gun. You either use this or contact adhesive but contact adhesive, while neater, takes longer and I have to use it in the garage and my face got quite bad rashes when I use it so that’s out. Also it’s only pro is neater seams but I can cover those up with colour and wearing on the armour anyway so shrugs. This is a large one. Hotter glue so strong seams on big armour pieces. Takes big glue sticks. More expensive it was around like 30 quid I believe but v v important and this one you can change from low to high which is snazzy.
Small very cute glue gun. Used for tabs on pepakura or tricky smaller seams. Like 5 quid off amazon with 100 glue sticks coming with it. Had or like a year and still working fine.
These are the cool foam brushes I use. Got them from the America Amazon just becasue I was doing a giant shop from there. Around like 50 for a handful of quid, really quite good and you can wash them out to be used all over again. If you get to the paint before it dries first that is!
This is the foam I use. It’s around 8 ish mm which I like a lot. From ebay. Holla if you need the link for it I can get that for you just don’t have good internet today.
Right onto sealing!
Heat guns aren’t just used for shaping materials like foam and worbla, it also seals eva foam and gets rid of those bad air bubbles in the surface.
You can see the difference here between non sealed and sealed foam. It can take a lot of heat so don’t be worried about that!
Next goes down a layer of pva glue just so the plastidip has somewhere to go onto. Very cheap in general. And I’ve had this in the cupboard since I was a smol child so.
Right Plastidip. Again ask if you need the link. I do NOT get one that is a spray paint. You waste most of it if you spray it. So I prefer it in the dip can. Just slather i on with a normal paintbrush. It will come out with dips and bumps and not a smooth surfacebut once it’s dried and settled down and then also painted over it’s perfect. Makes the piece very flexible and tough so perfect for halo armour that you move in a lot like I do.
This is Mod Podge! I used to use this in place of plastidip but it wasn’t that touch and cracked when bent. The foam around thigh pieces especially if you have chunky thighslike me would start tearing as I walked so that was bad. I still use this stuff though. Once the plastidip has dried it’s sort of sticky so getting a nice coat of paint on it is hard. Just use a foam brush because they’re cheap and honestly wonderful to smooth one layer on and ta da! It goes from sticky to a lovely smooth surface. It also acts as a primer so now you’re free to do your painting straight off the bat!
To show you the finished product, here’s a shoulder piece that I did with this method. Air bubbles sealed in with the heat gun, bumps from the hot glue along the seams mainly covered from the plastidip and a nice smooth surface for the paint to take to. I also really like this autumn like colour scheme for Spartan Coco :3
Hope this helps!!