Been wanting to get stuck into a full scale wearable paper costume project for some time. I think paper and card are perfect materials for this because they are cost effective and diverse enough for you to easily customize/personalize your own versions. Whether that's for an event, a fan film or simply for a conversational display peace. All I need supply are the basic net patterns and assembly instructions for you to print onto the colour card of your choice.
Finally, I settled on the idea of recreating the Iron Man costume, or at least the helmet from it initially. The most frustrating thing about this project was trying to find the right coloured paper to make it with. I went through every shade of red and gold paper/card stock I could find from metallic to matt finishes. In the end I felt that this costume only really worked with the Metallic foiled cards, and in my experiments I found that gluing them together is as tricky as trying to glue the clear cockpit canopy to a plastic airfix model kit. The glue both melts the foil and doesn't absorb into the paper very well making a rather brittle and messy joint. Would advise using strong double sided sticky tape on foil card instead.
Finally found the perfect shade of gold which worked really well next to the brushed metallic red card I had found and although the back of the Jaw line still splays out when warn, which irritates me a lot. I am really pleased with how convincing this model has turned out considering it's only made from paper. A strong alternative compared to the cost of a 1:1 replica or the poor mass market fabric / plastic facsimiles.
Although I'm still looking into ways of getting rid of that last niggling flaw along the jaw line for that perfect engineered sleek look when warn. When I showed this one of to my friends they immediately wanted to see the rest of the armour. This will be a real cool costume for the fans when it's finished and have already begun work modeling the neck and chest sections in Sketch-Up. Unfortunately however I need to put this project on hold for the time being while I concentrate on some of my other more pressing projects... :-)
Finally, I settled on the idea of recreating the Iron Man costume, or at least the helmet from it initially. The most frustrating thing about this project was trying to find the right coloured paper to make it with. I went through every shade of red and gold paper/card stock I could find from metallic to matt finishes. In the end I felt that this costume only really worked with the Metallic foiled cards, and in my experiments I found that gluing them together is as tricky as trying to glue the clear cockpit canopy to a plastic airfix model kit. The glue both melts the foil and doesn't absorb into the paper very well making a rather brittle and messy joint. Would advise using strong double sided sticky tape on foil card instead.
Finally found the perfect shade of gold which worked really well next to the brushed metallic red card I had found and although the back of the Jaw line still splays out when warn, which irritates me a lot. I am really pleased with how convincing this model has turned out considering it's only made from paper. A strong alternative compared to the cost of a 1:1 replica or the poor mass market fabric / plastic facsimiles.
Although I'm still looking into ways of getting rid of that last niggling flaw along the jaw line for that perfect engineered sleek look when warn. When I showed this one of to my friends they immediately wanted to see the rest of the armour. This will be a real cool costume for the fans when it's finished and have already begun work modeling the neck and chest sections in Sketch-Up. Unfortunately however I need to put this project on hold for the time being while I concentrate on some of my other more pressing projects... :-)
