With part 1 and part 2, I had covered all the pieces of Barry's armor which had fewer than Alphonse's. But if Al is a complete armor with just a small unarmored loincloth, Barry has several accessories, which allowed me to let go of the EVA foam a bit to work on something else. But also, not quite...
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…).
3. Crafting
The chopper:
This is Barry's iconic accessory. Of course, whoever says Barry the Chopper, says… chopper knife. In all the scenes where Barry appears, he has his oversized chopper. Barry is massive, so his accessory must be just as big.
The handle is a single length of 32mm diameter PVC tubing. I flattened one of the ends to attach it to the blade, softening it with my heat gun.
For the knob, I stayed in the plumbing department with a pipe elbow, necessarily adapting to the diameter of my tube:
Since it was too big, I resized it a bit:
All that remained was to model the shape on this base, using epoxy clay:
For the blade, I simply made a pattern on paper.
And for his knife too, but we will talk about that further.
This shape was cut three times in 1cm thick high-density foam. Once the three layers are glued together the chopper would therefore be 3cm thick. But before gluing, I removed a rectangle of foam from the middle plate:
This way the flat part of the handle could be sandwiched:
To glue the plates, I used a "contact glue type" spray glue. It does the job but it's not great either:
Once the different parts are put together, it already starts to look a lot like a chopper:
Except that there is zero cutting edge. This is why I used (for the first time!) high-density foam. This foam sands more easily than low density. So I sanded the edge on one side and rounded the back on the other. But to avoid having dust everywhere (or at least less), I first roughened the thickness with a cutter.
That's the moment when you wonder if you made a mistake...
Going back to the glue, its foamy texture created gaps between the plates, like a kind of air bubble. So I filled the back with EVA foam filler :
The knife :
Originally I only thought of making the chopper, but Neevillia asked me to also make the knife that Barry often has in his other hand, especially when he meets Alphonse.
I'll review its making pretty quickly since it is very similar to the chopper.
The blade is also made of three layers of EVA foam, but as the knife is thinner, I used 5mm foam, still high density. To compensate for the slightly flexible aspect of the blade (since it was only 1.5cm thick), I reinforced it with a length of galvanized wire.
the iron wire is embedded in a sanded gutter in the center of the middle foam layer.
Unlike the chopper, the knife handle is flat, but with rounded edges, so I simply had to flatten the entire length of the handle, then re-cut the corners to round them off:
Like the chopper, the edge is finished by modeling directly with epoxy, and as for the chopper blade, the cutting edge was cut with a cutter and then sanded, just like the back.
After that, the knife was ready to paint.
The Harness:
Over his bust, Barry has a kind of studded harness. According to the pictures, there are between 4 and 6 wide straps of leather, edged with studs, connected to a central ring at the front and at the back. To keep it simple, I made four straps, two at the shoulders and two at the… Hips? (If anyone finds Neevillia's hips on this costume, please contact me…).
The rings are EVA foam dowels that will later be painted silver. And for the straps, I used some shiny black faux leather.
The pattern of each strap is the same, not quite a straight band but more a band that would be a little potbellied in the middle, with a tab at each end to attach it to the ring.
Test fitting, we can see that if the shoulder straps fall correctly, those on the sides have a slightly unsightly crease. So I made a clamp to make them fit more against the torso:
Second fitting, we can see that the crease has disappeared:
Just missing the studs !
There are 24 studs per strap, I'll let you calculate the total (96 for those who are lazy). Am not gonna lie, I had no desire to cut/prime, paint/glue, a hundred things (slices of foam dowels? Googly eyes?), so I looked for an alternative.
And the alternative to nails is simply...nails. (“Wow Sheldora you really invented hot water there…”). Indeed, I used large upholstery nails, the kind used to decorate the edges of old armchairs.
Since I didn't have much confidence in glue to hold metal to faux leather (basically plastic), rather than cutting the nail stems, I folded them down parallel to the nails like this:
Here there are only the nails of one strap.
Like that, I could use the stems to grip the faux leather like a kind of button. Once the nail spacing was determined, I pre-drilled the strap and threaded all the nails. To make sure they wouldn’t come undone on the way, I added hot glue to the back of the strap just in case.
Finally, to prevent the nail stems from scratching Barry's bust, the four straps are lined with black felt and a generous layer of contact glue.
Note that the felt is slightly smaller than the strap to be able to fold the faux leather edges to have a rounded edge and not a raw one.
The belt :
Barry's belt is made on the same principle, just with a different faux leather (because I didn't have enough of the first one), and only two nails at each end, still with a ring of EVA foam dowel. The only difference is that the belt is about a mile and a half long so you can go around Barry's big belly, and make a knot, and still have enough to have some hanging.
Especially if you consider that the belt is also lined with felt (to hide the gray on the back of the faux leather), which led me to almost intoxicate myself with glue vapor to assemble the whole thing.
(In real life it is probably like 3 meters.)
4. Sewing
Because yes, there is a little bit of couture for Barry. Starting with her hair:
Originally, with Neevillia, we thought of using IKEA carpet, as was the case for Loki. But in the meantime, Ikea has stopped making the synthetic fur rug.
I ended up using a rather ugly faux fur vest I found second-hand. I wanted to recut a piece in the back of the vest, but in the end, the two front pieces when joined from the side (the edge originally sewn to the back piece) got the right narrow shape at the top and more flared at the bottom. As a bonus, since the vest was lined with fine cotton, with sewing the lining back on, we hid the ugly interior of the fake fur:
Fun fact, the vest closed with a white hook, which is still fixed somewhere on Barry's helmet.
But the real sewing is of course the toga. Of which I have no photo.
It must be said that Neevillia bought a plaid that already had a smooth brown side and a hairier cream side. Then she came by one evening after work and made me put on the foam bust. Then she draped the plaid two or three times on the belly, put a pin which immediately got lost in the fur of the plaid, then a large drawing clip to maintain the location of the future seam. And There you go. I saw the plaid transformed into a tunic on the morning of the Herofestival. It seems that she slightly shortened the plaid on one side and then cut the pseudo sleeve to give it a ripped look….
Note that I took care not to talk about painting in these three making-of parts. Unfortunately, I had to go for it at some point. But as these crafting posts are long enough and as much for Barry as for Alphonse, there is not much to say about the paint I will make a single post on the painting for both as well as on some finishing touches (in particular the eyes of the helmets).
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