Monday, March 8, 2010

Berserk - Griffith Armor Notes

This mini-tutorial has to deal with gauntlets, like this one:



You start with the fingerplates. First, you take some scrap .020 styrene (--you DO remember to save your scraps when you're working with plastic, right?--) and cut out a shape that looks roughly like a fingertip:



Apply a generous portion of hotglue to the fingertip piece and press it against another scrap piece of styrene. Curl it slightly, and hold it in place until it cools:



Trim the plastic around the fingertip. (You should now have a fingertip piece that has two layers of plastic and is curled to fit your finger.) Create the next fingerplate (to go over the middle joint of the finger) by placing another scrap piece of styrene over the top fingertip piece (as shown) and tracing out the shape you want the middle fingerplate to be:



Hotglue another layer to the middle fingerplate in the manner described above. Next, cut out a long strip of styrene (about 6 inches long and 1/4" wide) Glue the fingertip plate to one end of it. Overlap the middle plate over the fingertip plate as shown and hotglue the bottom of the middle joint fingerplate directly to the strip. Avoid gluing it to the fingertip plate. You want to create a movable joint.



Note: You may or may not have a gauntlet pattern to work from when creating your hand and finger armor. (I would advise, if you want to learn about gauntlet patterns and use them to create your own gauntlets in any style, that you go to a website like the Armor Archive and study their fingered gauntlet pattern. Sorry, I can't really be of any help to you in developing a gauntlet pattern. You'll just have to do it as I did- by trial and error; by printing out a pattern, cutting it out and practicing fitting the pieces together until I created something that looked like what I wanted.)

For this particular gauntlet, I had one more piece to create - the bottom piece. (When making a gauntlet pattern, you'll find that each bottom, middle and fingertip piece is shaped differently depending on what finger it goes over and what hand it's on. Needless to say, it takes a LOT of trial and error to develop a pattern for fingerplates that fit smoothly over your fingers and allows for a decent amount of movement and flexibility.)



In this (and many other) gauntlet patterns, there's a knuckle joint piece which goes directly over the knuckle and covers the joint between the middle piece and the bottom piece. The knuckle piece must be conical so the knuckle will fit into it when the finger is bent. Start the knuckle by taking a square piece of styrene and making it into a pyramid. (Which you'll have to do by clipping the styrene, overlapping some edges and hotgluing them together like this:)



Draw the shape of the knuckle piece onto the pyramid and use it as a guide to cut out the knuckle piece.



Reinforce the pyramid by hotgluing tiny strips of styrene onto its underside.



Hotglue the bottom of the knucklepiece to the top of the bottom piece, making sure the joints fit over your finger and bend in the right places:



Most gauntlet patterns have a portion of the armor that goes over the hand. (In this case, the hand portion is a series of plates which I made from 2mm craft foam covered with styrene, which I had bent in a decorative fashion). Hotglue the strip/fingerplates section to the hand section, taking care that the joints line up with your fingers correctly. (Of course, you'll need to make a series of fingerplates for each finger. Once all the fingers are in place, you'll need to create a knuckle bridge --made from more pyramid-shaped knuckle joint pieces lined and glued in a row-- to go over the knuckles closest to the palm of the hand.



You may have noticed I placed tiny little decorative studs/rivets over the knuckle joint pieces. I made these by putting little dabs of hotglue onto the styrene (I'd recommend trying this with a mini-gluegun.)

Here's a view of an unpainted gauntlet next to a painted gauntlet:



And here's what they both look like after their initial coat of paint. (I used a chrome metallic spray paint for the first layer - I'll brush on more detailwork with Testor's brush-on metallic model paints.)



And here's a random picture of my Griffith Armor under construction.

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