The rest of the armor was all painted with Rustoleum sprays. well, yeah, it demanded a test fit!Īfter I'd gotten the air-exchangers on the front completed and added on, I chromed up the faceplate with some Krylon metallic chrome spray. just putting that together makes it already look like something pretty impressive! :coolĪnd once I had the bulk of the helmet done. Of course for the Blood Dragon, the faceplate of the helm is a very distinct, and unique design. I thought the "dry" time would be a problem, but if you plan right, it's not. For me personally, I find the contact cement works a lot better. I had also by this point switched from using hot glue to contact cement for building. By this time, I had found the Harbor Freight floor mats, with the nice carbon-fiber texture. Once the rest of the build was pretty much done, I came back and rebuilt the helmet. I also wasn't keen on how the seams came out.īUT - I wanted to move on to other pieces and keep it moving along. While I finished this one, it was over-scaled a bit, and the foam was pretty flimsy. I hadn't found the floor mats yet, so I was using some foam I had ordered online. I started in on a rebuild in foam, with hot glue. After many many hours of sanding to little effect, I decided that is not the method for me! I wanted to finish before I turned 50! :rolleyes After an inordinate number of hours cutting out and taping a zillion little pieces of paper, I started on the bondo process. Originally, I had started doing the build in card-stock, figuring to do the whole bondo/rondo thing. Of course, being my first build, there were a couple of false starts here. feet aren't exciting! So, I started with the helmet! :cool The smart thing to do, as Joshua Cullen suggests, would've been to start with the feet to get my bearings with the material, especially being my first build. I'm going to split the write-up into a number of posts on this thread. The complete set of files is zipped up and available here: All Blood Dragon Pep Files. I'm working from the files extracted by Darhood, and then unfolded by Zero-Sama and myself. I took my colors - with a little liberty - from this reference image. I went with a different color scheme than the usual shades of silver. May do a separate write-up on that, but it's pretty similar to my prior Talon build, just out of foam instead, and with a little less detail as it was thrown together in about 20 hours. I also threw together a foam version of the M-358 Talon heavy pistol to go with my armor, since the con was rumored to be throwing away people's non-foam props. But then I think it was about July or August I had time to buckle down and go whole-in and managed to finish it in time for NYCC 2014! This was my first time dressing up in costume since Halloween when I was about 5 or 6 years old! LOL Was a tad bit nervous, but a veteran cosplayer friend who went with me assured me "Don't worry, once you're in costume, it's really nothing!" She was right! :cool I started it shortly after NYCC 2013, and had some false starts, and some slow going at the beginning. It also however made for large open areas where it was hard to hide bad seams and foul-ups! Live and learn - lol. I figured the fact that it had a lot of large, flat areas without too much detail would make it easier for a first build. For my first attempt, I had chosen the Mass Effect / Dragon Age crossover Blood Dragon armor. Okay, so while I've done about a half-dozen props, I completed my first cosplay about a month ago.