Things didn’t exactly go to plan this week. I found out a few things about being a UK based cosplayer that made life difficult and almost ended in disaster. It also meant I couldn’t get on with the more impressive build that I wanted to do, but nevermind – lessons learnt and going in the EVA foam tips blog.

So here is the tale of last week’s adventures. I finished cutting, gluing and sanding my chest piece – pretty happy with that. My cosplay helper also dutifully taped up my head so I could make a pattern for my mask, the whole of which took about 3 hours to draw, cut and assemble.

After reading Kamui cosplay’s books and watching a few videos, I know that plugging any gaps is important and for that I needed sealant. I made the (foolish) assumption that kwik-seal is the same as any other sealant and bought silicone bathroom sealant and spent many hours applying it. When I went to sand it down after 24hours, it all pealed off. After hours of research, it transpires that I a) can’t get ahold of kwik-seal conveniently in the UK and b) that I didn’t want sealant (DEFINITELY not silicone either – turns out my primer doesn’t adhere to that at all) – I wanted acrylic decorater’s caulk.

Off I went back to the hardware store, caulk bought and more application time. It went one better than the silicone stuff and behaved more like the videos, so I thought “phew – sorted”. Nope. Sander on and off it came again. So generic decorater’s caulk can’t be sanded. More research resulted in finding ONE product that does everything I need it to and that’s evo-stick decorater’s caulk WHICH DOES ALLOW SANDING.

By this point, I’d actually created more lumps and bumps than when I started, so I bodged it together as best I could and got on with priming, knowing that this wasn’t going to look as perfect as I’d intended. Thankfully my primer behaved perfectly and this is where I am now. I need to cover the primer in black paint (I know it’s black already, but the spray can couldn’t get into all the fiddly bits and I want to be sure everything is covered) and then I’ll paint properly!