EVA Foam Robot Costume

I Love Robots tm. And if you have the same dream as I do which is "become a robot someday" but science isn't quite there yet I have the next best thing.

So when our HSC visual arts class got told "you can make whatever you want for your major work" I knew IMMEDIATELY what I wanted to do. And so over 230 working hours later I presented this guy!

It's also the only reason I took as many photos as I did (and probably the only reason I remained sane during year 12), normally I get so into what I'm building I completely forget to take photos.

SO LET'S GET RIGHT INTO IT

Supplies

EVA foam

- Generally 0.5 cm thick is ideal for the main construction, the 1cm thick garage floor mats are harder to manipulate, but it is doable if that's all you have access to. The 1cm foam is excellent for the soles of the feet, structural support and thicker parts, and kids craft foam is great for a lightproof backing and subtle detailing. Doesn't have to be expensive cosplay foam, the cheaper the better here, I went through about 3 3 metre by 1 metre rolls. I got mine as garage floor mat sheets from the reject shop. Do be warned though you'll have to sand off the backing to get it to glue in some parts

Contact cement

- This stuff is magical, it gives you very strong, very clean and flexible seams. What's more is that you can sand the seams even after they're glued. In the past I've used hotglue for foam, but it doesn't stick as well and if you try to sand it you just gunk up the sandpaper. This stuff WILL eat and ruin your nice brushes so i reccomend going and getting a cheap kids brush set, cheap housepaint brushes are generally too big and create a huge mess.

Plastidip

- This is a spray rubber that seals the foam, giving it a nice finish and prevents the foam from absorbing all of the paint. This stuff comes in many colours and effects, so if you find plastidip in the colours that you want you don't even have to paint it!

Shower caulking silicone

- This is used to seal gaps and imperfections in the seams. Make sure it doesn't dry soft! I used some of the soft drying stuff on the head and whenever it flexes the paint flakes off. You can even find sandable variants of this too if you look hard enough!

Spray paint

- These are your main colours! (that is if you can't find plastidip colours to your liking). Spray paint allows you to cover a wide surface area in minimal time, and leaves no brush strokes! I used a 2x coverage paint, which is a 2 in one primer and paint, meaning I had to use less coats to cover the whole thing

Acrylic paints

- These are for details and weathering!

Spray sealer

- This protects the paint from any dirt or scratches. It also gives a uniform finish to the paints if they were different finishes to start with! (very useful if the selection of colours isn't that great and you have to use paints with different finishes)

Plastic Christmas Ornaments

- These are used as the diffusion domes in the light up orbs to disperse the light

Synthetic fabric dye

- This tints the plastic christmas ornaments so that they're slightly less see through, they still look red even if it's too bright to see the lights, and strengthens the colour of the leds

Mirrored cardboard

- This is used as a reflective surface around the leds, if the light bounces back off of the inside of the christmas ornament, instead of being lost it's reflected back out, making the leds brighter. It also makes them look shimmery and cool

Sandpaper

- I used regular ol sandpaper to cloud up the insides of the ornaments. I have no idea what grits I used, they were just laying around, there were 3 different grits though. Just keep going until it's past scratched, into cloudy, but not smooth.

Carbon Fibre Rod

- This is the main structure of the wings, and the pivot for the claws. It's light, flexible and relatively easy to work with

Rope or kite string

- This was used for the parts that could be puppeteered

Masking tape

- For keeping areas from getting painted that you don't want to

Old bedsheets

- This was hotglued glued over parts that needed more support to give them more strength

Sewing Elastic

- This is the resistive force that brought the claws back to their resting position

Superglue

- This is what holds the carbon fibre rods to the rope

Cheap welcome mat

- Specifically those ones with the thin felt top and the rubber underside. Used as soles of the feet to stop gravel from eating through the foam

5 volt LEDs

- Your glowy parts! I tried using regular leds, but they just weren't as bright. You could even use led strips or addressable leds too!

Wire

- Pretty self-explanatory, connects electronic components

9 volt batteries and clips

- The juice for the leds! Went with 9v over rechargeable due to the fact that 1) I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to rechargeable batteries, 2) time constraints, and 3) If you're at a con (if they ever come back) and need to get more batteries, you can just run up to the supermarket and get some more. I used a different battery for each part so the electronics are all self-contained in each armour section and you don't have wires running through the whole suit

100 ohm resistors

- These bring the 9 volts down to 5 volts so that you don't burn out the LEDs, and so that you don't overheat the battery! Trust me, you need these

Acrylic/perspex sheet

- The visor! I believe I used 0.5cm thick, but it may have been thinner. If you want a curved visor at all you're better off using PETG

Window tinting film

- Makes the visor dark! It's like wearing sunglasses. If you've got a curved visor this stuff won't stick, you'll have to tint the visor with synthetic fabric dye like the ornaments

Fabric

- The bodysuit! This is what all of the armour attaches to, and any other fabric parts you want for your design

Wash away stabiliser

- If you want to have appliqued details such as sewn lines on the wings you'll need some of this

Snaps

- These are the main way the armour attaches to the bodysuit!

Velcro

- This is the other way the armour attaches to the bodysuit! Generally used on the hard to reach parts where snapping the snap is hard to do

Hotglue

- For tacking stuff down!

EL wire

- For detail lighting

Upholstery foam

- This is used as padding to fill in the space between the armour and you. Also used for patterning

Duct tape

- Used for pulling the patterns

Paper

- To stick the duct tape to and for general pattern making

Cardboard

- To create 1:1 scale profile views for patterning and general prototyping

Reflective tape

- This was just an aesthetic choice. I used diamond grade since not only is it more reflective, but it reflects in a hexagon pattern that matches the bodysuit fabric and the general bug theme

Heatshrink tubing

- Protects the solder joints!

Tools

Dremel

- The best tool in the world, makes fiddly anding and plastic cutting a breeze!

Belt sander

- Could use the dremel, but I found this better for sanding the backing off of larger surfaces

Boxcutter knife and sharpener

- Your main tool! That's right! This thing was all cut by hand! Foam dulls the blade pretty frequently so a combo of snapoff blades and a sharpener keeps it sharp! If you have access to it a bandsaw would work just as well!

Hotglue gun

- For the hotglue

Heat gun

- This lets you heatform the foam and is a very fast way to shrink heatshrink. And no, you can't use a hairdryer, it doesn't get nearly as hot

Old/cheap sacrificial paint brushes

- For sacrificing to the contact cement. Contact cement WILL ruin your brushes

Regular paint brushes

- For detail painting

Respirator

- Plastidip, contact cement, foam dust, plastic dust, plastic fumes, aerosol are all NASTY. You DO NOT want to breathe that in. I used an organic vapours filtered respirator

Eye protection

- Once again, SAFETY! You will be using the dremel and the belt sander a LOT! And those ceramic cutting discs LOVE to shatter

Washing up gloves

- Do not recommend touching any of the chemicals directly, also keeps your hands clean :)

Sewing machine

- For sewing the bodysuit together! But if you really wanted to you could do it by hand. The machine definitely speeds up the process

Electric knife

- Used for carving the upholstery foam, if you don't have one you can use scissors

(I probably forgot something here, but I was as thorough as I was able to be!)

Designing your robot is one of the most important steps! This design will provide the framework of your design and will give you a guideline to follow when you actually start building it! Don't worry if it takes a few tries to find a design you're happy with, this guy took around 10 revisions before I was happy with everything. I recommend finding a central theme or object to design around and mixing that with some geometric shapes. I personally chose surveillance cameras and insects. My "finalised" design continued to change as I built the suit depending on the sole factor of "what would look cool here?", so think of your design less like an immovable thing that you Have To Follow and moreso as a general guideline and clear direction.

Once I got a solid idea, I decided to make a small scale model out of tape and cardboard to translate the 2d shapes into 3d space to help me with the upcoming full scale sculpt. It helped finalise the main general shapes into something I could follow. The process generally involved cutting out a silhouette, figuring out how wide each part should be, gluing the width to the silhouette and then bridging the gap with some tape (non clear would have been better, but I only had clear), creating a sort of low poly model. Having it at this scale makes it very easy to experiment with shapes.

In order to actually get your armour, you need to pattern it!

I do my patterning quite different from most people, but it's the method I've found that works best for me

First you tape a bunch of sheets of paper together until you have one big piece of paper. Then you lay sideways on the paper and trace around yourself. You now have a rough guide of your body! Then you can draw a profile view of your design around your body. Once you're happy with it you can cut it out and transfer it to cardboard, and then cut THAT out and hotglue it to a bodyform (It's much stronger than paper for the next bit)

Making a bodyform isn't too hard! It's mainly kinda awkward and you'll need help making it. General gist is, put on a painters suit, perform the world's longest T-pose (my dummy's fairly old so the arms are droopy, twas fixed with a wooden dowel) while your helpers cover you with duct tape, then they cut you out, you reassemble the dummy and stuff it with newspaper, giving you a perfect form of your body and avoiding you having to do any math to figure out if it'll fit. There are plenty of tutorials online that go into depth, just search duct tape dummy or duct tape mannequin

You can Then start hotgluing upholstery foam to the cardboard and carving it into shape with the electric knife. I recommend using sharpie to mark guidelines. If you take too much off, don't panic, you can just glue more foam on and carve it down again. This part takes a while, take your time, take breaks, and keep an eye on how hot the electric knife is getting as it may overheat an break (one electric knife was harmed in the making of this costume). The arms and tail piece were made in the same way.

Once you're happy with the shape, you can start covering it in duct tape to get the pattern! This follows the same principle of the duct tape dummy, you're basically creating a duplicate shell of the sculpt! Actually figuring out where the different pieces are is a skill that takes some time to get used to, but here are some general areas I find to mark the lines:

-Hard edges and sharp corners (you'll want to mark these saying that you'll want to cut a bevel into them)

-Parts that come to a point (bevel here too in some cases)

-Contour lines

-Separate pieces

You may notice that I have marked the detail pieces here already, I didn't want to tape the armour again so I marked where they'll sit. Once I'm done with the general shape I can tape those pieces back together and then cut out the second layer of patterns. the dashes that look kinda like stitches are called registration marks, they help you line up the pieces perfectly later.

Once you're done patterning and BEFORE you cut it off, please, please, PLEASE label your pieces and to transfer these labels to your foam!! it makes putting it back together WAY easier, especially with a complex pattern such as this. And take many, many photos of the labelled pieces while they're all together still. A few weeks working on it in these random pieces become unrecognisable on their own. I don't know how many times these photos above have saved my butt

Once you're ABSOLUTELY SURE you've taken enough photos of the patterns you can cut along the lines, and stick each piece to paper, the idea is to get it to lay flat, but if you can't then make a cut along the curved bit up until you hit the centre of the curve, it should lay flat after this. These are called darts! (make sure to add registration marks here too, and to cut out a notch where the registration marks are!)

I only carved and patterned half of the body since I can just flip the pattern and get an entirely symmetrical second half. Way less materials, effort and agony of getting it symmetrical on the other side

The head was drafted with cardboard, since it's essentially just a box on the bottom half, and the pattern was pulled from the draft in the same way as above, the only difference being that it was wrapped in a thin sheet of cling wrap in order to prevent the tape from sticking to the cardboard. Some pattern pieces are made with clear tape here, this is only because I ran out of duct tape, you can use any tape for patterning but I've found that duct tape is more durable and way less likely to deform or tear

Patterning the bodysuit was way easier than all of this, I just traced around some old pyjamas, lengthened the sleeves and legs, added a few bits, and presto! There's your draft pattern. I tested the pattern using some old bedsheets in order to check the fit, adjust the pattern to get it to fit better and then that can be transferred to the final fabric!

You will go though SO MANY sharpies here, whether it be that the foam has sapped them dry or they decided to venture to the realm of lost socks, keep a bunch of them on hand.

When tracing onto your sheet of foam, It's way easier to weigh the edges down to stop it from curling back up again. I used paint bottles, hammers, a vacuum cleaner, a large metal pot, whatever works so long as it's heavy and won't cut the foam. Also make sure to mark all of the info that's on the pattern piece, what it's called, the registration marks, and whether it belongs to the left or right side (which one's which depends on what side of the armour you decided to carve) Organisation will help you a LOT in the long run

Remember to keep your blade sharp and check whether you need a bevel on that line or not! sharp blades mean clean cuts which lessens the amount of cleanup you'll have to do and makes gluing way easier!

Once all of the pieces are cut out, sort them into piles of what part it is and what side it is, for example a pile of all the left arm pieces go in one pile, all of the right foot pieces go in another, etc

The hardest part to cut was definitely the front lens piece since I had to cut two particularly tight circles with an exacto knife, and I couldn't sand it due to being inaccessible to the belt sander and the dremel would eat too much out of it, so I had to cut it exactly right. I believe it took me 4 tries to get it right. Nowadays they sell cosplay circle cutters online for doing exactly this with 0 effort if you need to cut a circle out of something

Be sure to wear your safety gear for this step! Dust and fumes are nasty!

When starting to glue pieces I like to start with the darts. Heating up the foam with a heat gun and forcing the foam into shape before you glue your darts makes them WAY easier to glue. It not only helps with getting the general shape, but since the foam is already near the desired shape there's less stress put on the glue joint, which also makes gluing easier too!

Make sure to follow your registration marks, otherwise the pieces won't glue right.

Once everything's glued you can clean up the seams with your favourite rotary tool or sander. Going over the sanded parts with a stone grinding bit for the dremel helps get rid of any of the fuzziness (I didn't know this at the time so my stuff's still a tad fuzzy)

For the claws I marked a dot with sharpie where I wanted to drill, making sure to put too much ink on there, and then pressed that piece into another claw, making sure they're lined up, and presto! Easy symmetrical drill holes! These pieces were then drilled out and put over a carbon fibre rod with some random nuts glued in for spacers (I didn't have any washers)

Purpose? They look cool.

I make a pattern of these by marking where I want the lines to be with masking tape (less sticky than duct tape so won't damage your foam) and tracing a line with sharpie where the line needs to be. Then I take off the tape, stick it to paper, flip it and trace it so I can get a mirror image on the other side. Then you lightly score the foam along these lines, they don't have to be deep! You can use a metal ruler as a guide to help keep the lines straight (once again I found out you could do this after I did all of them, all of mine are freehanded). Then hit em with the heatgun and watch them open up! This is a really easy way to get clean looking panel lines. If you want them thicker you can use a soldering iron to burn the lines in, but it's much harder to get them to look smooth.

To get those markings on the sides of the claws that look like bolts, I took my dremel with the sanding drum on it, and pressed the top of the drum into the foam (the one side that doesn't have sandpaper on it)

Sometimes the glue doesn't stick right, or a seam was just slightly misaligned. Worry not! For there was a product specifically made for filling gaps: silicone shower sealant. In my research (for this project and wondering if I can make my own pouring silicone for molding) I've come across two types

1) The soft one. Usually comes in a little tube. This one isn't what we need for this application since it'll flex if ANYTHING touches it, causing the paint to crack. I found this out the hard way :/ (the clear silicone in the photos)

2) The firm one. Usually comes in those big tubes that you've gotta use a caulking gun for. Much harder to apply but won't cause the paint to crack

For those of you in the US, I've heard qwik seal is the stuff to use (apparently type 2 in a small tube), but alas we don't have it down here, so I'm using some random stuff I had lying around.

To apply it: WEAR GLOVES (this stuff is STICKY), apply it to your finger and press the silicone into the gap, smooth it over until it's level, and let dry! You can even leave it kinda rough and build up layers to look like weld lines!

This is the part where most people would point you towards a standard store-bought pattern to make the bodysuit. Unfortunately I can't read store bought patterns (too many lines and they're flimsy anyways), so I traced around a pair of old pyjamas, doesn't have to be fancy just has to fit; and used that for my pattern. Then I made a prototype out of some old bedsheets in order to test the fit and to see where to adjust, you can just draw directly onto the prototype whilst you're wearing it (the purple line on the side of the first photo is where I needed to add more fabric for example)

Once adjusted, it was onto the final fabrics! I chose a hexagon embossed spandex to fit with the robot and bug themes. Assembly is roughly the same as the prototype. Trimming seams as you go keeps the inside looking nice and clean.

So how are we gonna attach the armour to all of this? A combination of velcro and snaps!

Since I didn't have a snap gun, I went and bought a metre or so of those snap strips and cut them into segments so I could have those individual snaps. I then glued one side to the interior of the armour padding, waited for it to cool, then put a tiny dab of hotglue on the other side and carefully put the armour piece on to make sure it sits in the right place. It's a very good idea to not let your glue gun get fully heated for this, because I did in some parts and OWCHIES. Once the snaps are tacked on, I sewed a blanket stitch by hand around the outside, making it so no edges can get caught on anything and making the connection from the snap to the bodysuit SUPER STRONG. The velcro was attached using this same method. Whether you use velcro or snaps is determined by if you can actually push the snap halves together for that piece.

For the battery pockets I just sewed some small squares big enough to hold a 9V battery and glued some velco in there. It doesn't need to be sewn since it's not going to have much strain on it. The backings of these are more cotton bedsheets since it takes hotglue really well.

The wings all in all were the most tedious pieces to make, clocking in at 45 minutes to finish the red details for each half side. I started out by taping paper together and drawing out the general shape I wanted, and then started filling it with patterns, giving it a feel somewhere between mechanical and organic. Then I pinned the pattern to the fabric and cut out 4 pieces. Next I put the stabiliser over the top of the pattern and trace all of the patterns and lines 4 times over. Don't recommend using pen or any alcohol based ink since it'll run when we seal it later. Next I pinned the stabiliser pieces to the wing pieces and set my machine to do an satin stitch (very tight zigzag, stitch width of 5mm and the length was set to the feed for my particular settings) and just started sewing along the marked lines. Get a movie or podcast ready for this bit since it'll take a while. After you're done remove the stabiliser (I used wash away stabiliser so I just let it soak in the sink for a bit) and once it's ready (in my case dry) seal the stitch with some fray stoppa in a well ventilated area. That stuff stinky. Once it's dry you can sew the two halves together. Their stucture is held by carbon fibre rod that I found in the trash (yes, really!), with a running stitch and a little bit of super glue to secure the rod in there.

The fabric pieces for the toe joints were patterned with masking tape and then glued in. Same deal with the fabric on the tail.

Make sure to try it on after every major change! This helps you figure out whether you have to add more or cut away some pieces to make the fit or range of motion better

Taking a video helps heaps with figuring out what pieces work with each other, and what pieces need working on.

These are the glowing parts (LITERALLY the most noticeable) so they've gotta look good!

I cut the ornaments in half with the dremel (broke MANY ceramic cutting discs) and cleaned the edges up with the sanding drum (slow speed these things are really thin)

Next up was sanding the insides! This makes the plastic act as a diffuser which spreads the light around. I started off with some low grit sandpaper and moved up to some higher grits. Don't have to go TOO high though, we don't want this shiny on the inside, just cloudy. You could probably get a similar effect by masking off the outside and spraying the inside with some matte varnish and sloshing it around so it doesn't pool

Idye poly is my dye of choice, it was designed for dyeing synthetic fabrics, which are made of plastic. These orbs are also made of plastic; Neat! Which means that the colours in the dye will bind properly to the polymers in the orbs. MUCH easier than hunting down orbs in the colour you want. (near impossible, trust me I've tried)

Initially I was dunking them one at a time with a pair of pliers (and dropping them in the bucket. Who knew water made things slippery?) like the visor tinting tutorials I've seen online, however after about 30 minutes of doing that I got tired of doing that, and realised that it would take a very very long time to actually tint them all (and the water would be cold by then, meaning I'd have to buy MORE dye. At $15 a packet. No Thank You!). So I just grabbed some tulle I had laying around (a type of mesh used in dance costumes and such, easily found and very cheap at the fabric store), scooped up all of the orbs, tied up the end, and just DUNKED EM. Way faster. Since you don't have to hold them you can walk away and do something else for a while, just check back every 20 minutes or so to stir them around a bit, rinse them off with cold water (seals the colour in), and dunk them back in. Repeat that process until they're as dark as you want them.

I backed the orbs with some thin craft foam with a reflective material hot glued to it. You may see in the photos that I used foil. Please Do Not Use Foil. Since the foil was conductive it kept shorting out the leds ""Mysteriously"" (you'll see that later on). You're better off using mirrored cardboard or reflective tape, which since they're thicker are WAY easier to work with too. These backings are just hotglued onto the edges of the orbs, which are then glued into the foam (little glue on the front as a faux rubber seal, LOTS of glue on the back)

You may notice that the tail orbs look kinda weird compared to the rest of them. That's because I used table tennis balls for those since I couldn't find any other sized clear xmas ornaments at the time (found some recently and am gonna install them soon) so if you were going for more of a matte and opaque look or can't find any xmas ornaments they work great and don't need any sanding done to the inside of the dome as they're already great diffusers. You do have to watch out while colouring them as the original white of the ball causes the dyed colour to be tinted slightly more white, eg the ones above are pinkish rather than red.

I wired up the leds in parallel (positive to positive, negative to negative) in sets of two for each armour piece and glued them into the orbs. Remember to put a resistor in there so you don't burn them out. (plus overheating batteries are SUPER SCARY)

Now you know how I was talking about the foil backing? Foil apparently conducts electricity and now I can confirm firsthand that it does. That combined with the fact that I forgot to add resistors the first time round was certainly An Experience. Turning off the circuit before the resistors and switches were added was a case of "why is the battery so hot??? OH. GET IT OFF GET IT OFF" (and then I decided to pursue an engineering degree)

So tldr, leds, switches, battery, resistor.

(side note yes I now know you're supposed to use voltage limiters to step down voltages but I did not know that then. And the stakes aren't all that high in this project, if a led burns out it can just be replaced. Or you can just use a 5 volt power supply in the first place lol. I went with 9 since every armour piece has its own power supply to be more compact and to avoid wires across joints which both inhibit movement and since they're under constant flexing, break quicker)

NEXT UP: EL WIRE! I poked holes in the tail and threaded 3 metres of EL wire through (and had just barely enough) and hot glued the battery pack in place. I tried tacking down the wire to the fabric part of the tail but no glue on earth seems to want to stick. Hot glue didn't work. Super glue didn't work (and discoloured the parts it touched). E6000 would probably work but would need to be clamped (impossible for this shape). Contact cement would be too messy. So I just left it unglued. If anyone knows what glues bond to EL wire please tell me in the comments I'd love to know. :)

Puppeted elements was something I was really keen to try out on this build! Both the wings and claws have some posability to them.

The claws has a hole drilled through them and were threaded into more of that carbon fibre with some various bolts and washers for spacing. I believe it might have been from one of those instant tents with the rods that crisscross to hold them up. Next I glued some kite string to the underside of the claws, making sure to leave MUCH more excess to attach stuff to later. After that dried I made finger holders out of foam, whiiich ended up being much too bulky. I managed to find some rubbery novelty rings in the party section of kmart and ended up using those instead. (more on that later) In order for the claws to be pulled back up into a neutral position instead of just flopping around, I added some sewing elastic that was the width of the fingers (lucky me!).

The wings originally were going to be MUCH different, being actuated by a linear, well, actuator. But due to time, budget and weight constraints I opted for the much easier option, consisting of a hook and lever. The rods of the wings poke out from the back of the armour, and have fabric glued to them to act as a hinge. Glued to the ends of the rods is more kite string (knotted first, and then super glued for adhesion) and glued to that is another smaller rod, making up the lever. The hook part is 2 layers of the edging of floor tile foam glued along the spine. It holds the wings really well, however I can't adjust them while wearing the entire suit, but generally when wearing something this big you should have a handler that can help you anyways.

I hotglued some scrap foam to the insides of the pieces to help with the next few steps. Hotglue doesn't stick very well to foam under stress so it's easy to remove later, but has just enough hold that it will hold things in place. Some fishing line was then tied to these holders so that they could be hung from the clothesline for painting without touching each other. I also masked off all of the areas I didn't want caked in paint, such as the fabric bit's I had added at this point, the elastic, the orbs, etc.

In order to stop the foam from soaking up all of the paint, as well as to smooth out the foamy look, I applied Plasti-dip, a kind of spray rubber to the foam. The entire suit took about 4 and a half cans for 3 coats. This stuff STINKS and is not fantastic to breathe in so once again be sure to mask up! If you don't have plasti-dip near you you can try the rustoleum stuff, I tried it a few years ago and I recall it having a rougher texture, which could be a benefit if that's what you want!

The paint I used was Rustoleum 2x, since those were the only two different greys in the entire hardware store that didn't match eachother. HIGHLY recommend this paint, it's fantastic coverage sped up painting immensely. And for those who can find them the mont marte lamp black is a perfect match for the rustoleum 2x black if you need to paint match :)

I used paper patterns to cut down on masking, I should have used cardstock or photopaper since it leaked through in some places, but it wasn't to hard to just paint back over it

Next up was details! These were all painted by hand, starting with flat colours for the ears, and then moving onto an acrylic wash for the shadows and to bring out all of those lovely panel lines, and then finally drybushing silver

After that I sealed the paint, although in retrospect I should have sealed the paint, applied the weathering and THEN sealed it for protection to stop the paint from blending together so much. Since the paints were 2 different finishes, applying a sealer made them both the same finish, wonderful life hack once you know it.

The visor was made out of some thin acrylic I had lying around, about 3mm thick, and applied some window tinting film to it to get the dark look. Very easy to see out of! However if you want a curved visor this stuff only sticks well to flat surfaces, I'd recommend the same technique that was applied to the orbs, just in more coats to make it darker.

The kind of reflective tape I used is called diamond grade. It reflects more light than the normal stuff and you can notice it reflecting in daylight. It's the kind of retroreflector that has the hexagon print on it used very commonly on road signs and traffic light poles. (If you want to learn more about retroreflectors I highly recommend technology-connections' youtube video on it) Believe it or not finding hazard striped reflective tape in diamond grade is surprisingly difficult. You'd think that it'd be relatively easy to find since you see it everywhere. NOWHERE had it in store, only the solid white or yellow diamond grade or the way less reflective hazard tape. I managed to hunt some down on ebay and it was well worth the search.

Now that the HSC is over, it's time for some quality of life improvements I noticed needed doing from after the HSC photoshoot

The eye led kept falling off no matter what glue I used, and it was looking a bit 2D compared to the orbs. So I wandered into Daiso one day and saw they were selling dummy security cameras. I used the rotary tool to cut and sand the lens, and then glued in the led and the lens with some jewellery E6000 (the crystal clear stuff). It has remained firmly stuck in place since :)

Next up is adding rubber welcome mats to the feet, improving their grip and protecting the foam from getting chewed up by rocks. It's an upgrade I've been meaning to do to my costumes for YEARS but haven't been able to find the rubber for it. Turns out the cheap welcome mats from the dollar store are PERFECT, and they even have a felt backing to the rubber, making them incredibly easy to glue. To make sure the glue stuck well I sanded the bottom texture off of the feet, as the factory texture is heat sealed, making it very smooth and anything glued to that texture will just peel off. I traced roughly around the mat to figure out where to put the contact cement, and then coated both the mat and the bottom of the foot with 2 layers of contact cement to ensure a strong bond. I went a bit over the lines I rough traced so I didn't have to worry too much about aligning the glue perfectly. Then I mashed it all together to make sure the 2 surfaces are well contacted and let it cure overnight. After that I cut the bulk of the excess rubber mat off with scissors and then cut the rest off with a snap off blade to make it flush with the edges.

FUTURE UPDATES

AKA stuff I want to add but still haven't had the time to do so yet

The finger rigging was the main thing that bothered me while wearing this for an extended period of time. The revised finger loops fit alright, but since they were made out of Mystery Material they came unglued pretty quick. The solution is keyring loops! Light, thin, cheap; AND you can clamp the cable between the loop, tie a knot and then glue that knot, giving a MUCH stronger connection hopefully.

Another nitpick was that the finish of the tail orbs wasn't the same as the rest of the orbs. Well, in that very same daiso I found some smaller clear christmas ornaments almost the same size as the ping pong balls! The process for those will be the same as the rest of the orbs.

And there you go! Now you too, can run around as a robot!