20 Jul Maker’s Monday: Creature Features part 1
Hello everyone! Happy Maker’s Monday! I hope all of you enjoyed last week’s guest post from Mangoloo, and are ready to get back to our usual schedule. Now, over the weekend it was announced that our ren fest would be cancelled for the year, and understandably so, but that doesn’t mean we have to stop working on our original plans for it. Just means we’ve got more time!
So this week I started building Velvari’s horns! I’ve got the usual suspects for building: 5mm craft foam, C4 clay, contact cement, and something to cut. I’m also using a premade pattern from KamuiCosplay! It can be purchased here, and is pretty simple to follow along with, so let’s get started!
First things first: cutting out the patterns. When you’re working with things that will be curving as you put them 
together people will often put little divots in the pattern so that you know where pieces will be properly lining up. They’re very tedious to cut out but it’s important you don’t skip doing so because they help immensely. If you’re using a premade pattern pay close attention as well to the instructions on cutting. You don’t want to have to recut a 90 degree angle because you forgot to mark that it was supposed to be 45.
Once you have all your pieces cut start carefully assembling them. I would recommend before doing so that you hit the pieces with a bit of heat to make them more flexible. If you forget to do so (like I did) and end up with gaps however you can easily fill them in before you eventually move on to sanding the edges. I also recommend attaching the pieces one at a time rather than building two halves and then trying to stick them together.
And that will give you your base horns! From there customizing them is doing whatever you want. Velvari is a bard, 
and likes to decorate his with chains and gold bands so at the moment I have some C4 drying around my horns so I’ll have a place to add attachments for the chains that I will be putting on them. Later this week I will make sure to upload a video that shows how the finished product looks with its paint job and chains.
And I’ll see you next week, when I’ll be working on more of Velvari’s creature features. Perhaps a tail? We’ll see!