Gamora sword tutorial

Hey guys!  Time for another picture heavy post!
   I've been busily using what little spare time I have these days to work on my Gamora costume. It's coming along pretty well, but I sure wish I had the kind of time I used to have to work on this stuff. :/

  Today's post is just for her sword, because since I've been jumping around this costume with the attention span of an ADD gnat, it's so far the only thing I've actually finished.

I like easy whenever possible.  So instead of trying to sketch it out, I found a good pic of the sword (this is actually the Hot Toys version), chopped it into three pieces, printed it out and taped it together. Easy peasy pattern!

Then I traced it onto foam.   This is an exercise mat we'd bought for a completely different purpose and never used. It was a little too porous...more on that later. As you can see, I traced two.

Here, I've cut them out and sandwiched them together using spray adhesive with a thin dowel in between for support. This may not have been necessary but I felt better about it with the added stiffness.

Here I've roughed out the edges. Then, I used the heat gun to heat the edges and pinch/mold them together into a sword edge.

Next I looked at a bunch of pictures (seriously, looking at pictures is about 80% of the time used in making any costume) and I drew lines where the carvings are in her sword.

Then I used the cheap soldering iron (not the good one!) to melt/carve the lines into the sword.

A few of points here. One, I don't recommend doing this indoors, and if you do, make sure there's plenty of ventilation. I grew up in the country and we burned our trash.  Ever burned styrofoam?  Now, imagine that smell in your house.  And since this is close work, right up your nose. Seriously, this is probably going to give you cancer or something. Two, I forgot to take any pics of when I added the dimensional details.  Her sword has a sort of metal wrap type detail near where the shorter blade attaches.  I have no idea how to describe how I did this.  I just took thin strips of craft foam and sort of heated/molded them and wrapped them around that area.  I realise this is a terrible description and I apologise! But I didn't take pics, so...fail.  And three, remember when I said it was porous? Well, when I used Plasti Dip to seal it at this point (another thing I didn't take pictures of) I discovered really quickly that Plasti Dip- as cool as it is- won't actually smooth out a surface.  What I should have done was use Mod Podge to seal all the pores first.  But I didn't. Live and learn.

Here is the sword after Plasti Dip and paint and before I fixed the detailing, There were a lot of gaps so I used hot glue to smooth the gaps in the detailing.

Almost finished! I made a simple black wash with water and acrylic paint for the grooves to make them stand out.  Also, I have a lot of Jell-o shot cups.  Don't judge.

And here it is (mostly) finished!

When I'm finally done (hopefully soon!) I'll make another post for her costume and body paint.  Stay tuned!