More and more armor pieces are being offered unpainted for you to do yourself but there are many available ready to wear. These tend to be made of fiberglass 9 times out of 10. This is great but fiberglass is very heavy and can crack quite badly over time. Perfect for a display piece though.

I wanted to make something not only cheap but which was good quality. I definitly didn't have $250 to spend. One site called "The Meditation Chamber" (Included in links page) shows a great way to make a flexible armor using vinyl place mats, the kind you set at the dinner table which gave me an idea.

I found a template (Available to download) on another site (The name escapes me but please if you know, let me know so I can give credit) for another semi flexible piece of armor made with placemats. I really didn't want my armor flexible as I wanted to be able to display my costume on a mannequin when not being worn. There is a fantstic material I use a lot called Sintra PVC. It's an expanded foam plastic used for signmaking which is about 3 mm thick and comes in sheets. It costs about $40 for about 6 sheets measuring 4 x 3 feet so it's quite cheap and very easy to work with. (I ended up using quite a bit of this stuff) I cut out the template and taped it to the Sintra. (As shown below) Just to let you know, Sintra is a thermoplastic which means if you heat it, you can bend it easily and shape it. Once cooled it holds it's shape. Be careful though as it can be brittle if you heat and cool it repeatedly.

After drawing around the template with a white marker, I cut out the pieces with a very sharp craft/utility knife like so....

The utility knife cut through the Sintra quite easily but it does leave a sharp edge on the plastic. Sanding with a fine sandpaper works great. Lay the pieces on top of each other to check the fit.

Now it gets tricky. The sintra needs to be heated to shape it. I used a large frying pan with boiling water and dipped the pieces needing shaping in the hot water. This actually works very well and creates a very unform heat distibution to only the parts submerged.

I needed to keep trying the main piece for a fit of my chest. (I highly reccommend covering yourself with a towel as it gets kinda hot) Once I was happy with the main part, I let it cool and did the same with the remaining pieces but shaped them onto the first main piece once it had cooled and retained it's shape. The great thing about shaping it against myself while hot was the fact that it fitted me perfectly. Once done I glued the pieces together in layers and ended up with a rather authentic looking 3 dimensional piece ready for filler and paint. Once cooled it was also nice and rigid and is really quite strong as it is layered. See below.

The filling and paint was easy. I used Bondo auto body filler for the edges of each piece and blended them in smooth with a good wet and dry sandpaper. Give everything a good sanding to clean up the edges and get the final shape you need. The Bondo is MUCH denser than the PVC so if you sand too much, the PVC starts to sand away faster and some parts need to be refilled with Bondo again. If you can, try to become a minimalist with the application so you have less to remove and add more if you need it later.

Then it was a case of masking off the sections, spraying with auto paint and then clear coat. This is what I ended up with.........

I only used 1 sheet of Sintra, 2 rattle cans of auto paint, 1 rattle can of clear coat and a small tub of Bondo. All in all I worked out this piece of armor only cost me about $25. Now that's a bargain. From start to finnish it took 2 days to make, most of which was drying time. The actual labor took about 5-6 hours. I attached the shoulder bells to the armor with a piece of leather cut from an old belt and small allen bolts so the bells would remain flexible and allow for movement. The bolts were painted to match the armor. (They can't be seen under the cape anyway but makes it look nice)

Waddaya think?

The shins were made in exactly the same way. I didn't have a template so I kinda guessed the dimensions which works fine especially considering everyone is different in size and what looks good on me may look out of proportion on you. Just ask Vaderkinde at "The Meditation Chamber" who made her costume 3/4 scale as she is only 5 ft 2 inches tall. :)

My shins came out like so...........