The arms took a surprising amount of time. Although it makes sense if you think about it, each arm has 8 separate foam pieces, and humans have two arms, and there are two of us! So that's four arms, so....that's 32 separate pieces. Half of which had to be painted due to the N7 stripe, which we painted in two stages, we had to wait for the white to dry overnight before painting the color. So yeah, the arms were not difficult per se, but very time consuming!
One of the first things we did after cutting out the shapes was yet more painting! The grey is rather dark and colors always stand out more on light surfaces than on dark. So I painted the white first and then did the directly on top of that. Also that seemed easier than doing 3 separate stripes. I had a little of the white bleed under the tape, you can kind of see it at the bottom of the picture. Well paint thinner is a pretty harsh chemical and I was nervous to start using it on the foam, so I decided to see if just old fashioned rubbing alcohol and a Q-tip would work, and it was actually quite effective! It took some elbow grease, but it cleaned the excess paint right up.
Now another mistake we made is we painted the red and white stripe right down the middle of each foam piece, well it wasn't until we put all of the pieces on that we realized that the seam isn't always directly down the center. The bicep is offset, so when you put them all on, the strip on that piece did not match up.
Ugh! hahaha So we did have to re-do the bicep.
For the shaping, we needed something vaugely arm-sized. So we found a wine bottle, and well gosh, it seemed silly to use one with wine still in it, so of course first we needed to drink some wine ;)
Earlier we were using a heat gun to shape things, but the broil in the oven just works so much better. For small pieces we didn't even set it down, my husband just wore an oven-proof glove and held it for like 45 seconds.
The gauntlet fit my husband's arm great, but his hand was too big to get it back out again, so instead of gluing it closed, we just glued on a small clip so it would open and close.
We also glued strapping to the inside of the shoulder so it could attach to the should strap on the chest piece. And we added some velcro so that it straps around the bicep.
And here is our completed female arms!
For our hands, we thought about getting plain black gloves and adding foam to them, but that seemed like a pain. I started looking at gloves on eBay and found some motorcycle gloves that looked perfect! So we just painted the right one red and white and the left one we painted the details in grey.
So here is a look of what we have so far all put together, we realized the shoulder pieces are a bit too big so we are going to have to cut those down at some point.
We have a lot of individual pieces done for the female armor, but we are still waiting for my EL Lights to arrive, so we have not been able to put everything together yet. We also own more grey foam than purple foam, so we make the male pieces first, that way if we royally screw up we don't waste the purple foam.
