[ENG] Making-of : Alphonse (Fullmetal Alchemist) Part.1

I’m a big fan of Fullmetal Alchemist, it was one of the first manga I read when I start Highschool, and I have been a fan since. Weirdly, Neevilia never really try to read/watch it, besides « that one episode with the dog » (if you know, you know), that for no reason, everyone had seen, even without knowing FMA.

For the 20th birthday of the series, a new edition was published in France. I was talking about it with Neevilia, who thought that maybe it was time to try it. No need to tell me twice, I lend her my Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. And while we were watching it (because of course I was watching it with her), I thought « It would be pretty amazing to do Alphonse in cosplay, his armor is quite cool ! ». And so, FMA was added to our (still growing) cosplay list.

With the « Making-of » posts, I go over the whole conception of a character, including the mistakes sometimes made, and when possible the sewing part (for which I don’t always have pictures…). 

1. Costume Choice

There are some minor differences in Alphonse’s armor, depending on the adaptation (manga, first anime, and Brotherhood), so I choose to base my costume on the manga version, using the new edition (with a bigger format) as a reference. 

And for the color, I used the new art book. (There were a lot of new FMA books in France this year).

2. Pieces list 

Because it’s a full armor, there are a lot of pieces and not much sewing. But because you know, Alchemy, no accessory or weapon.

It's also quite difficult to understand what part of the armor is one piece and what part is several. I decided to do it the easy way with: helmet, bust, collar, shoulder pads, shoulder straps, arms, elbows, forearms, gantlets, thighs, kneecaps, shins, and feet.

For the sewing part,  there is just one apron? Loincloth?

Since it’s a lot of pieces, this making-of will be cut into several parts (a least three)

3. Crafting

If not otherwise specified, the whole armor is made with 5mm EVA foam.

• The helmet :

The helmet was the first piece I made. To start with an independent piece, that we can fit without the rest of the armor, is quite motivating. It’s like we quickly made big progress (but don’t worry, it’s just an illusion, there’s a lot to do…). Sadly, because I made the helmet before I start this blog, I don’t have a lot of progression pictures.

Even with basing the armor on just one support (the book version), the shape of the helmet tends to change from one page to the other. Basically, it’s a rounded shape, with a double edge in the back, a decorative plate on top, and a strange thing that hold the horse hair. In front, there is obviously the characteristic face plate, a rectangular chin, and a visor with a spike.

For the base, I used a pattern I already had, made for the helmet of Jane Foster the Mighty Thor. It’s a three pieces pattern, made directly from Neevilia’s head. When all the pieces are glued, we have some sort of bowl:

In this picture, it’s Thor’s bowl, but it’s exactly the same for Alphonse.

On the base, I added a first long strip to make the first edge, and then a second to double it. Every strip is decorated with a thin border made out of 3mm EVA foam, with the edges rounded with the Dremel (rotary tool). Did I have some painful flashbacks of my Medusa (making-of not yet in English) and Palutena costumes, where I had to round so many armor edges? Yeah absolutely.

With the border in place, the helmet looks like that :

Nothing very complicated with the decorative plate on top or the faceplate, the first one is from 3mm EVA foam, and the other 5mm.

For the faceplate, I started with a 3mm one but it was not looking very good :

I eventually decided to put everything up a little, and to do the face plate from 5mm foam so, when wearing it, my eyes would be facing the tiny slit on the cheeks (and yes, it was my only way to see in the con..).

For the chin, I did many tries, but no pictures of it. (When I craft I tend to be so into it that I forgot to do progression shots.). But to give you some idea, here is a picture of all my prototypes patterns :

Long story short, in all my tries, the chin angle tended to be too straight, so the spikes of the mouth were not sitting correctly, or the chin was too tilted on the bust and would have hit the chest later on. At last, I choose the angle I wanted :

And then I adjusted everything else to fill the gap between the chin and the helmet.

I don’t have any picture of it, but I of course did the round thing on the side of the chin, with a circle of foam cut to fit directly on the helmet.

The spike is just a cone made out of foam (but I will explain it on the shoulder strip part).

For a long time, the helmet stayed like this :

Mainly because I was too lazy to motivate myself to do the horse hair thing on top of the helmet. (Procrastination on boring pieces is quite a recurring part of this FMA project, and I didn’t talk about painting yet, which I hate by the way.).

With some motivation obtained, (and because I had to finish the helmet for the painting part), I report the curve of the helmet with a specific tool :

Then I traced the curve on paper :

Because the piece had to be quite large and sanded, I cut it twice on 10mm high-density foam.

We can notice that :

1. During my procrastination phase, I tried to take more pictures of my crafts. Seriously I have more pictures of the tiny piece than for the whole helmet.

2. Since the pieces are so thin, I didn’t have to transfer the curve. Straight foam could have been bent slightly.

But mostly :

3. My pieces look like eyebrows.

So of course :

The eyebrows were glued together and sanded, they were glued on top of the helmet, ready to be painted :

Yeah, I forgot the take a picture, so here the helmet already has a first layer of base coat. 

• The bust :

Literally the central part of the armor, the bust was the first piece where I needed to think a little about the construction. First, because there are a lot of layers :

(I forgot to redo this image in English, so FYI: couche = layer)

And mainly because Alphonse is quite massive, and I weigh like 50kg (don’t know how many pounds it makes). So I had to stuff my silhouette a lot, but without overdoing it, because I still needed to move my arms easily. If I enlarge it too much, my shoulders would have been trapped inside the bust. I also needed to not « swim » in the bust, a thin Sheldora in a big Alphonse’s chest…

To avoid that, before layer 1 of the bust, I did a layer 0, with an approximately fitted pattern, to use as the base for all the other layers. It would be in my size, but it didn't need to perfectly fit my measurements.

So you can admire my patterning skills :

Besides that, thanks to this base, I cheated with the other layers to use less foam. Layer 1, which should be the real base of the bust, is just a strip :

Here it’s the back, but it’s the same at the front.

To thicken the chest, I put some spacer between layers 0 and 1 :

It’s some re-propose of the edge of some 12mm EVA foam square.

Same for layer 2, also a short piece, back and front, with some 5mm spacers.

The inside of the piece with the spacers :

On the side of the bust, technically under layer 3, like a layer 3 bis, there are three decorative plates, at the circle of layer three. I just cut the same pattern three times, on 5mm EVA foam:

But, the group of plates need to be attached to layer 0 but to appear beneath layer 3, so it needed more spacers. Because they overlap, the upper one is farther to layer 0, so I needed to compensate for that: the down plate has a 12mm spacer, the middle a 17mm one, and the upper one a 22mm :

Like that, every spacer is on the same level. Later I added a fourth plate from 2mm foam, to hide some little spaces between pieces.

For layer 3, this time, the piece covers the whole base, but has the particularity to be removable, to paint more easily later on. There is just a spacer at the neckline to compensate for the thickness of layers 1 and 2 and to attach layer 3 to layer 0 (everyone follfollows

Finally, the bust has a big spiky thing on the chest. At first, I thought I could just do a geometric shape, with two triangles joined with a 45° angle at the front. But it did not fit layer 3 at all, there was a big gap. So I had to make a specific pattern. But how to do it without a base? Well, I just modeled the shape using paper and tape, before tracing the shape I wanted :

Then I reported the shape twice on foam and glued it with a 45°angle cut in the middle. 

Left the geometric attempt, right the modeled one.

The top is shut with a piece that will hold the collar later.

Testing before gluing :

For the bust, I even did some schematic for the layers before, I didn’t strand too far from it :

• The collar :

I leave the chronological making-of now to follow a more logical order. Since we saw the top part of the armor, it seems logical to speak about the collar. That one too, I kind of procrastinated a lot.

To be honest, my collar is not really « screen accurate » so to speak. Even with my best efforts, my bust is less wide than the original, so I had to adapt the collar for it to fit correctly with the helmet without going too much on the shoulders.

Like always, I started with a very approximated pattern. I held it to the bust with tape, I had to add some paper at some places, and even cut darts for it to fit mostly ok :

After that, I made a clean version, to store it in case I needed it later.

Since the collar is quite thick on the side of the face, I had planned to use some 12mm leftover (from the wings of Palutena’s scepter), but I had just enough to cut it once, so no place for mistake. So I did a mockup with some floor mats :

And finally the 12mm foam. But it didn’t fit right. Because of the thickness of the foam, some bulk on the back prevents the collar from curving, but paradoxically I needed the thickness at the sides… I decided to cut some grooves inside to remove some thickness and help it curve: 

And on the back, I sanded at an angle to make better contact with the bust.

For the flat part of the collar, I made a pattern directly on the bust with masking tape:

After that, I transferred it to paper to keep a more durable version. After adding details, the pieces were cut in 5mm EVA foam:

I just needed to put some sort of fixation (I will probably make a post just for armor closure).

With the collar, the bust looked like that, ready to be painted :

With a cameo of the leg pieces and my skinny arms…

To be continued in part 2...