Around the Time Pokémon X and Pokémon Y came out I wanted to make costumes for the Team Flare Scientists. I focused more on Aliana (orange haired girl on the right) but at the time of writing this I haven't gotten far in making that happen. I did however start and finish a belt buckle portions of the headgears.
While making this buckle I had a lot of time to learn what works and doesn't.
I started with what I thought would work. Cutting some pieces of foam board and adding clay. This had worked somewhat decently before but I quickly shelved the idea realizing the spray paint would soak in and destroy it and I felt the form was much too wide.
I started out looking at various images namely the one at the top, focusing on the girl in the center.
I cut and pasted the buckle image into Paint.net I outlined it, and then I resized it to a comfortable size. I chose to get as close to four inches while keeping the shape. I chose 4" because I was referencing the size of a buckle a friend of mine had that I felt was extremely similar in thickness.
After printing the outline out I traced it onto 3/4" MDF I cut the shape out with my Black and Decker Compact Saw, A great tool for small things. Leaving me with a rough cut piece.
After cutting I sanded the edges, smoothing out bumps from the cutting. I then drew two more concentric rounded diamonds. I grabbed my power sander and started a sloping sanding motion.
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| Please note: I consume those Peach Sparkling waters any chance I get. |
After three days of sanding by a combination of Power Sanding, sanding sponges, and sanding by hand with various grit sand papers, from 60 ending at 2500 grit Automotive Sand paper I was left with a smooth object that my friends who witnessed my constant sanding could only describe as a "rock".
I painted it with various paints and got it looking acceptable. However I as a newbie to MDF ran into the obvious two problems. Paint Soaks into it like a sponge unless you're using a latex house paint or something like that, and moisture got into it causing it to begin crumbling, I polished it up more and made a quick wax cast of it. I didn't have Smooth On at the time (I do not recommend using wax because most Polyurethanes heat up and melt waxes, I just got lucky)
After my fumbling and luck of the draw work I was able to get a perfect cast out of polyurethane. I sanded off some small bumps and prepped it for painting once more.
I began by painting it 5 to 6 times with white paint sanding any orange peeling away.
I took my traced symbol and placed it on contact paper which I then placed onto the buckle cutting it out to spray a few coats of red.
After removing the paper I found it was missing something, I didn't like the immediate shift from red to white so I traced around the red portion using a Sharpie. This outline separated the colors and served to clean up some sloppy some of the jagged or sharp areas.
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| Final Product (Right) Second Copy (Left) |
However Sharpie fade and smear purple so I chose to go over that with a 1/8" outline of black paint.
After all was said and done I polished it with a fine grit sand paper and removed any evidence of layering.
Finally I used my Dremel tool to put four small holes in the back and bent two pieces of a wire hanger and placed them in the holes vertically to hold it into a belt not the prettiest solution but it works. I took it out and gave to a few tests for possible failures at conventions.
I determined between weather, vigorous motion, dropping or color fading there should be no reason it would fail unless someone were to intentionally damage it.
Thanks for Reading,
Stephen
