What the Bleep Am I Doing?! Do As I Say, Not As I Do ~ Making Breastplates!

Hey everyone! Welcome to this week’s What the Bleep Am I Doing?! Rebel Fae’s Guide…

*Record scratch* Heh. I’m gonna do this quite differently today my little Rebels! For the past few WTB’s I’ve gone over how to master social media but for this one, it’s definitely in the realm of “Do as I say, not as I do.” Also, it coordinates with the title of the article brilliantly if I do say so myself.

So, if you guys have been following my social media as of late—The Rebel Fae on all platforms eheh, I recently finished my first armor project. This also involves the main topic of today’s article: the breastplate. Another thing about it really quick is it took quite some time to be made therefore, hopefully, this article will provide a lot of help to all of you when it comes to making your own breastplates! So, random Fae rambling aside and without further ado… let’s a-go!!

Kay first up on the list of advice when making a breastplate, for the love of all that is good and holy please measure, measure measure! When you use your patterns make sure you create the measurements to fit you directly. When you make your own it’s much easier to make it towards your own measurements, but if you use someone else’s you have to pay attention to the measurements of the pattern so you can adapt it to fit you perfectly. Don’t just guesstimate so to speak. That’s what I did when I got a hold of the pattern I was going to use to make my breastplate annnnd well…long story short, I had to go to the Cosplay Repair Station at Anime Banzai—the convention I made and took my armor to, and have them help me secure it with not only quite a bit of duct tape, but we had to thread a small jewelry wire through the connection points in the back and twist it so it would stay on me and not fall off. Safe to say, that day was a bit stressful always wondering if the breastplate would truly stay in place. Not to mention I had to go on stage later that day for the cosplay contest—which will be a WTB article for a later day I assure y’all.

Next up, I would honestly recommend prototyping somehow. Be it a drawing of what you want to achieve, or a full-on paper model of it. That way, you’ll get a good idea of what you’re aiming for with your breastplate. And you’ll get a good idea of how it could turn out and exactly what you want to do to make it come to life. Because with a prototype, you can label and cut different things to symbolize what you want to do with your breastplate. It’s simply making notes for future reference!

When you get to the step where you cut out your pieces from the patterns you have traced, something that initially wouldn’t be too important to consider actually has a big effect I find on the end project. And that is heat sealing and shaping your foam. When you do this, for example, the heat sealing makes your foam edges less rough thus easier to paint. As for the shaping that simply makes it easier for it to fit around your body. That’s where measuring it correctly makes a big difference.

Now for priming and painting!

Ohh boy this one. You’d think this would be an easy step, but for it to look good, this is a definite “Do as I say, not as I do”. For mine, I coated it straight up in Mod Podge—and no, I didn’t use the special Mod Podge Primer as I should have. When I put the regular Mod Podge on I thought it would be fine eheh. So many coats of paint not to mention I had to worry about the Mod Podge peeling like a lot. So don’t take after me, my friends. Use the right Mod Podge or us Plasti Dip. You’ll save yourself sooo much frustration.

No, as for the painting here’s a good tip: Use an old makeup brush or a relatively used paintbrush. Not the ones with the large, flat, and long bristles though. If you use the suggested brushes you won’t have any streaks to worry about in your project. Now, the streaks are easy enough to get out, but it just takes a while to smooth out.

Welp, that’s it for this What the Bleep! I hope you guys liked it and it helps somehow to learn from my mistakes. If you have any questions or wanna talk about your own issues with your projects I’d love to hear them!

That’s all for now…

Rebel Fae out!