Princess Aurora Armour
Heyya Everyone!
This page will be walking through the various stages of how I went about creating my Princess Aurora armour.
I made this armour to wear to MCM London October 2017, along with the other ItsTheNerdyLife page models. We each picked our favourite Disney character, and designed our own armour based off of our characters design. My favourite Disney character was Maleficent, but I have always adored Aurora's dress - so I decided to do a mash-up of the two.
Leg Armour:-
First thing I started working on for this costume was the armour for my legs. I covered my leg from ankle to mid-thigh in cling film, then went over this with a layer of duct tape. Using a sharpie, I sketched the outline of the shape I wanted the leg pieces to be. I made mine in 2 sections; a shin part, and a knee part.
After I had it sketched out, I cut it off my leg, and cut out the two sections I had marked.
The oval shaped piece, which was to cover my knee, wouldn't lay flat, so I cut a slit in it, then smoothed it flat. That was my pattern finished.
I transferred the pattern to some 3mm craft foam, however I only had A4 sheets of it, so I had to use 2 pieces to make the full shin pieces. I flipped the template over to the reverse side, and cut it out again to get a mirrored version for my other leg. The knee pieces were drawn on with the gap from the slit I cut.
All pieces were cut out, and I used contact adhesive to glue the slit edges together on each of the knee pieces, and to attach each shin piece together.
After they were all connected, I used my heat gun to sandwich the foam between 2 layers of Worbla. Once sandwiched, the whole thing was heated up and wrapped around my shin, and was left there until it cooled into shape.
The bottom edge of the knee pieces were heated again with my heat gun, then pressed against the back of the shin part to attach them in place. This was smoothed down to ensure a strong bond, and that they wouldn't come off when I moved.
I wanted to add a few details based on Aurora's original design, so I sketched a small version of her crown onto paper, then cut 2 of these from craft foam. These were both sandwiched in Worbla, then attached to the centre of each knee piece.
To tidy up the top edge of the knee piece, I heated a long strip of worbla and pressed it along the edge to neaten it up. A second strip of worbla was attached parallel to the first one, and smaller strips were placed diagonally between the two lines. This gave me a sort of triangular pattern going along it, which I think looked really nice.
As a child, the piece I loved most about Aurora's dress was the collar, which went off her shoulder into a point, so I also made two pointed pieces from foam to represent that, sandwiched in Worbla as usual, then attached these to the outside of each knee piece.
The final detail I added on was a piece at the top of the shin section, which was a V-shaped piece of foam, made and attached like every piece before it, smoothing it down to make sure it was bonded on as strong as possible.
After this was attached, all edges were finished with a thin strip of worbla to make them look neat.
I primed the whole piece using Smooth-On XTC-3D®. I mixed a small amount, and brushed it all over the piece using a cheap brush. I left it to cure overnight, to make sure it was ready to work on the next day.
I knew from the beginning that I wanted my armour to be mainly blue, with a few splashes of pink, to represent the dress when the two faeries are fighting over which colour it should be.
The good thing about the Smooth-On coating, is that it doesn't need to be sanded.