N7 Mass Effect Armor Build: Day 5: Painting the Female Breastplate, continuing the Male Breastplate

Well now it was time to paint that female breastplate we so carefully worked on, eeek! So I wanted to go for something similar to the coloring my FemShep had in her Mass Effect 3 armor. Which sadly involves stripes and 3 different colors.

So my foam is already purple, so my first task was to tape off with painters tape any parts that were remaining the original purple. The curved areas were especially tricky so I just ripped off a whole bunch of little pieces of tape to follow the curve.

For my paint I just used spray paint, first of all, that just sounds a lot faster. Secondly, I kinda suck at painting, and spray gives it a nice even coverage. I thought about using acrylic paint and a brush, but if you are not careful, then it can go on too thick and you wouldn't be able to see the cross-hatch texture of the foam. Also if you are not careful it can be thick and goopy in one spot, but thin in another, and ugh!

I continued to tape so just the part that is dark purple was showing, plus a little bit of the area that will be medium purple. That way when I paint it medium purple, I can just block off an area with painters tape and I wil get my dark purple stripe.

I did the first layer of paint, let it dry for like an hour and then put tape on top so I could paint on the next color and have the dark purple show through where the stripe is. Well, sadly when I peeled the tape off it did take some of the first layer with it. And the stripe is so thin I though, shoot, it is going to be REALLY difficult to spray such a small area. Hmmm, I wonder if I can just kinda spray some paint into a cup and then use a paintbrush to touch up the line, and the answer is thank god, YES that does work, quite well actually!

I used painters tape to block off the stripe, but I didn't want the stripe to be too fat, so I just took an exacto knife and cut the tape in half while it was still on the roll. So then I was able to spray on my next layer.

And then the big reveal! I am pretty pleased overall. Not the exact shades of purple I wanted, my FemShep has a much brighter color overall, but...oh well. That is the downside of spray paint, not NEARLY as many color options.

Oh, ALSO, so if your spray paint suddenly stops working, I highly recommend NOT turning it around and pointing it at your face......

I was using it, it stopped working. I turned around and went back into the garage and then looked at it, and woosh, hahahahah. Thankfully I was wearing glasses! I did find that taking the little cap/sprayer thingie off and soaking it in paint thinner works quite well however!

For the bottom edging of the male breastplate, we used two pieces of the craft store craft foam and layered them on top of each other to give it the right texture. We hot glued them together, and if you try to just make one stripe of hot glue the entire length and set the foam down all at once, the hot glue at the beginning has already started to cool by the time you get there, so you really want to lay them out how you want to go, start gluing in one corner, glue a little together, stop, move down a few inches and glue that together, ect.... So yeah, you will have a much easier time just gluing as you go a few inches at a time, rather than trying to glue one big piece.

Then we used the dremmel to remove away some of the underside of the male breastplate to glue this onto so that it is flush with the back side and glued that on.

We also started working on the back of the armor. So the back piece and the collar are connected. The collar has one piece that is smooth and the rest has the cross hatches. Rather than trying to sand it away or anything, we just cut the smooth piece out of the middle, and then flipped it around and glued it back in!

Then we did some heat gunning to it, we just held it in place with our hands as we did it, then afterwards we just used a zip tie to hold it in place as it cooled.