Day 2 & 3: Female Breastplate

So before we get too much further in our armor build we wanted to tackle what I think is going to be the hardest part, the female breastplate.  Now I am going to be talking more about breasts than I ever thought I would on the internet so if you are a dude, please feel free to skip this entry entirely because this will only be of a help to anyone making female Mass Effect armor.  That being said, I wanted to be as specific as possible because as a girl I felt there was a lack of specific information on the internet, I can find a lot more blogs on how to make male armor than on how to make female armor, which is unfortunate because the female amor is certainly more difficult.

So I have been reading EvilFX's blog:
 http://bioweapons.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/mass-effect-n7-armor-build/
and he just kinda got some half round objects and put the foam in the oven on broil and shaped it that way.  Now that all sounds great, but I was hoping to find some slightly more specific instructions, I am a scientist in my day job so I like to have very thorough protocols to follow with exacts times and temperatures, ect...  So I did a LOT of searching on the internet for good instructions.  I also, errrr, hmmmm, am not a small girl in the breast area, hahahaha.  So I also needed to make sure that my boobs would fit inside whatever armor we ended up making.  So I didn't want to use any old half round objects, I needed to find some that were big enough.  I went to the craft store JoAnn's and they had 6" round styrofoam balls which seemed about the right size.  I brought them home and I just literally stuck them in my bra and got a sharpie and marked where the edge of the bra cup ended on each ball.

I then cut the balls on that line (which ended up being a little bigger than half the ball).  We then needed to size the armor to fit the size of the breasts.  So we got out our projector again and lined up about where they should go, we left them in the bra which we figured would help to space them an appropriate distance apart.  (which I also think makes for a really funny picture, hahahahaha)

So now that we had the spacing and everything set, we nailed our styrofoam balls to a piece of plywood.  We also cut out a second piece of plywood (which is pictured further down) to help press the foam into place.

Now it was time to heat the foam, so people on the forums suggested 15 min at 250F so we gave that a try, the funny thing is the foam didn't quite fit in the oven, so we just had to leave the door open.  It also started curling as it heated.

Well, we were now ready to try our first stretch!

So unfortunately the foam was sitting on the oven rack and the lines of the oven rack melted into the foam on the underside so we got some very funny stripey breasts.

We tried again but put it on a cookie sheet, oh wow, that was even worse!  The middle didn't melt, but the edges melted even worse!

So at this point I realized that baking it really was not the way to go.  EvilFX uses the broil, which means the heat comes from above and hopefully that means the bottom won't melt as fast.  So we threw it in the broiler and literally after only a minute the foam started to heat up (broil is at a MUCH higher temperature than bake).  So we finally got something that was pretty decent looking.  Although the broil can be tricky, even a few seconds too long and the foam on top will melt, which is unacceptable since that's the side you see.

So we went back to our projector, drew out the lines and cut the piece out, and I mean it looked pretty decent, but it was certainly a bit small and did not actually fit over my breasts.

It was late, and we decided to call it a night and start fresh the next day.

So the next day we decided to try just making the styrofoam balls a bit further apart, which did work, but it just looked STUPID, hahahaha.  We tried getting some foam discs and placing them under the styrofoam to make them taller, but then it was hard to press the wood on top all the way down, so that also ended up making them look stupid.  We went back to the craft shop to buy the next size up styrofoam ball, which was 8", but those just looked laughably enormous!  Finally we settled on making the 6" balls just a teeny bit further apart, but also making the cut out on the top piece of pressing wood bigger and that worked ok.  So now that we finally had the breasts a decent size and shape, we needed to worry about the overall shaping of the breastplate which is a whole different can of worms.  Ugh!

So if you look here on this earlier picture you can see that when you try to pull the foam over the balls there is puckering off to the sides.

Now you can pull and stretch on it as you are shaping the piece, but unfortunately, the bigger the breast you are trying to make, the more the foam will become distorted and the more puckering you will have to try to compensate for.  Now I think if you are an A,B, or C cup you will probably have no problem.  Heck even if you are a D or DD it might not be so bad, but if you are in the F or higher category like I am, it really does present quite a challenge.  We tried pulling as best we could, and then going back in with a heat gun to try to shape things out, but that really didn't work all that well.  After hours of aggravation, screaming, and frustration we finally just tried to pull as much of the distortion as we could off to the top 2 corners since those would get cut off anyways for the final piece.  It looked really funny at first, but after extensive cutting, heat gunning, and shaping we finally had something passable, and at this point I was more than happy to accept passable instead of trying to drive myself crazy going for perfect.  I failed to take any pictures at this stage as I was tired, but I will get some as we are detailing the piece.

So I know this was a long post, but all in all the part was very doable.  As soon as we switched to broil we got something decent looking on our first try, and if it wasn't for the aforementioned size problems  this would have been pretty quick.  So if you are trying to do this on your own, take heart, it probably won't be too bad, unless you have giant knockers, in which case you have my sympathy.