Venture Bros - Henchman 21 - Belt Buckle Update I

Here's some more progress on the Henchman 21 cosplay!

I'd like to make a resin cast of 21's Belt Buckle. I haven't figured out how I'm going to attach it, but I am hoping to make it at somewhat functional belt buckle. (and belt in general) Further elaborating on the resin cast, I plan to do this by creating a vaccu-formed shell of the buckle (what I'm carving), then using spray mold release I'll just pour the resin straight into that. Silicone is expensive and for a one time use seems like an extravagant waste. Much like the Mask, this process is very similar. 

It starts with a template, after scaling the size of my reference photos to my own height I took some basic measurements, from that I turned to my trusty 3d modeler - Rhinoceros - (I prefer it to Illustrator, as I'm not familiar with the newer versions of Illustrator (I have CS3) shortcuts, etc). I printed it out and viola.

It get's traced onto another piece of hard green styrofoam, and cut out. Initially I rough cut it and then shaped it. The result of that can be seen in the next picture below. However I wasn't very happy with this because it was slightly oversized and I found trimming the sides down to be rather challenging. So I scrapped it, and started anew following the same method, but this time cutting it exactly too the lines before I worked on the middle 'gem' if you will. Again all the carving and shaping was done with a 13 inch serrated bread knife, I will have to get some photos up of the tools I use at a later date!
 

 

Last but not least, Bondo! Although the green styrofoam is hard enough to withstand vaccuforming pressure, the way it's composed could potentially cause small concave bubbles or imperfections in the plastic once vaccuformed. By bondo coating it, you are making a surface that, depending on the amount of time and effort you put into it is 100% smooth and none of those imperfections can occur.

I still have to do another coat to build up the bottom edges as well as some of the area that didn't come through. Finish sand and this weekend I may be able to try a few pulls on the vaccumformer. If not this will probably be address again sometime next week. I should mention that this will be the test before I do the mask to make sure that as an idea this will be sound!

As always feel free to ask me any questions, comment on what you like and what you don't like, I appreciate any and all feedback.

Cheers,
Kevin