Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How To Make Horns For Cosplay From Foam”.
Welcome back to the channel, i am super excited today, i’m going to show you how to craft these awesome horns and along the way you are going to learn about organic sculpting in eva foam, and this video is brought to you by worx’s x tool series more On that later, though, all the tips that i’m going to show you you can use with any other tools around the shop. Let’S just jump right into it. To make these i use eva foam. Eva foam is super common in cosplay and prop making, because it’s so easy to work with it’s extremely cheap and it’s easy to get your hands on. It comes in multiple, different, colors and thicknesses to allow you to do different stuff, since i’m going to be sculpting as in carving bits away. I used a big fat 10 millimeter thick piece to create my blanks.
The first step of the process is to get the shape you want to do to do this. I used aluminum foil, you can mold the foil very easily into a form and it holds its shape very well. You can see here, i’m molding it into shape.
For the horn holding it up to my head for reference and reshaping it and retwisting it and stuff like that, now to create your pattern off of this. What you do is you wrap the whole thing in tape? This tape sticks to itself and holds the shape that you want to keep after that. You mark some lines in the tape in places that seem like they would make sense to cut the form apart and be able to piece it back together, and then you cut it apart. Now i’m using an exacto blade here and that blade going into the foil, of course, is probably going to ruin that blade, but it seems to be the easiest way that i’ve come up with scissors are such a pain whenever it comes to the foil.
Now that you have a template, you can lay it out mostly flat on your eva foam and trace it here. I trace it with chalk, and then you can cut it out of your foam now. One thing that i do with my foam since i’m making pieces that are going to be round, i’m cutting a slight angle on the bits that go together, so i have less forming and bending to do. Of course, you can bend your foam with a heat gun and it will help it retain that shape.
So you can just hold it in front of the heat gun, bend it and it’ll help it just kind of keep it in that kind of curved state and what i did is glued it all together and then bent it some more we’ll get to that. In a little bit for eva foam, what most people recommend is contact cement if you’ve never used contact cement before here’s a tip? For you follow the instructions. A lot of people will just slide their contact cement on it. Stick it together and walk away and hope that that’s going to work but contact cement is pretty awesome.
How it works. Is you put it on both sides? Let it dry at least 15 minutes and then, as soon as you touch those two sides together, they stick and it’s fantastic once you use it properly. Contact cement works beautifully on eva foam, it’s like magic. So what i did is i slowly glued the sides together.
This can take a while because of course, you’re taking 15 minutes in between each section and with all those sticky pieces. You don’t want to try to do it all at once. I did it. You know one edge at a time and once you’ve got those edges glued together, you end up with a blank.
Your blank may not look exactly like the final product, mine’s pretty big and sloppy. So what i did here at this point is, i take the heat gun to it and i help shape it into the form i want. You can set up your heat gun on your workbench and have it blowing hot air wear some gloves, because it is very hot and use it to help. You form your material after you get it into the shape you want.
The next step is carving having the makerx tool was actually really nice here, because it’s battery powered, so i could take it outside where all the carving dust would go somewhere other than my workbench and my workshop. The carving part of this is pretty easy, but it does take a little bit of practice. You’Ve got your rotary tool, you put the uh little sanding attachment on there and you just take little quick passes to carve out a little bit at a time. Don’T worry, though, eva foam is super forgiving.
If you screw up, you can always cut a chunk out glue, a new piece in and start over with, the carving just experiment a little bit and get a feel for it. After you’ve carved the rough form, the basic shape you’re going to want to go in and add details in my case. That’S all these little tight, ridges and creases in the horns. Now an easy way to do that is with a soldering iron.
So i switched to the soldering iron attachment on the tool and i went to work at it here. I am just going in and adding all these tiny little creases a soldering iron will just melt right through that foam and allow you to do really fine details. While you’re watching me carve all those tiny little lines into that horn, i want to tell you about the sponsor for this video and that is the maker x series tools from works. This is a multi-tool system that is basically a power pack at the center and a bunch of tools that you can attach to it.
There is a rotary tool, a heat gun, an air brush, a an angle grinder and a soldering iron. That is also hot enough to be a wood burning, arts and crafts tool. I got ta say when they approached us for this video. I was super excited this tool actually kicks, but the rotary tool on it feels great in my hand, it’s probably similar to one of the more higher end kind of cable, driven ones.
You might have tried before, and you can see that i have been using it for this whole video. The fact that it’s battery pack based means that i could take it outside for different aspects, which was really nice to cut down on the smell and the mess in my shop to learn more, go to works.com, that’s w-o-r-x-dot-com or check down in the description below. For a link to the actual maker x series tools after you’ve got your rough sculpting and then your fine detailing in place. What you’re going to want to do is coat the entire thing in glue.
Some people use mod podge. Some people use elmer’s glue. I personally have a bunch of wood glue around and it works just as well. This helps seal it and seal those pores up.
So you don’t end up with something that just looks really obviously like foam. It isn’t absolutely necessary, but i did it because i i wanted it to have that kind of hard shell look to it and coating it in glue is an easy way to do that. One coat should do it, but you could always do more. I only did one coat because i didn’t want to fill the fine details and cracks and crevices.
I was sure to push that glue down in there with the paint brush and just did one coat and let it dry before painting it’s time to paint. Now. I am, admittedly not great at airbrushing. This is one of my first few experiments with it. I’Ve tinkered a bit in the past, but i can tell you that one of the tricks to getting something organic to look right is lots of layers of color. For these i started with a dark brown, and then on top of that i added some purples and areas where i thought you know it could use like some. I wanted it to seem like kind of alive and and like it had blood flowing through it. You know so i added some purples and like the the deep parts under the horn, then after that i came back by with a light tan to do on the front of the horns. The little ridges, where the front of it kind of has a lighter area. All this time i was looking at reference images off of the internet.
Of course, after you have all that on, it may seem too bright and colorful and that’s normal, and sometimes you want that. Look, and sometimes you don’t. I wanted mine to be more muted and natural looking so the next step for me is a black wash now a black wash if you’ve never done it is so easy, but it adds so much depth to your projects. What you do is you water down your black paint in this case i’m using acrylic paint, so i can just add literally water to it, and then you brush it on and it goes down into the cracks and you can either wipe off the top or you Can you know just kind of shake it around to get it to go down into the cracks and let it dry? I ended up doing three or four black washes on this: to get those cracks and crevices to look the way. I wanted them to look and then there’s one final step that really really tops it all off and that’s called dry brushing. That’S when you take a paintbrush and you get just a tiny bit of paint on it and you wipe almost all of it off.
So there’s barely any paint left in it at all, and then you just drag that across the tops of the ridges and it brightens up those tops and adds contrast to those lows. So it adds depth to the whole thing. For this i did a dry brush in a light tan and then, even though i typically try to avoid like perfect whites and perfect blacks on stuff. Like this, i did do a perfect white dry brush just across the front of it, where, for example, you’d be knocking your horns with something the next part is creating this little headrest part.
I thought about this a while, and i wanted it to be extremely adjustable. I wanted to be able to adjust the angle that the horns are at, as well as the distance between the two horns and how tightly it clamped on my head now. Luckily, i have a lot of hair, so i knew that i could hide a kind of sloppy holder here and a sloppy joint to my head. Some people don’t have that and well you’re going to have to sculpt something to cover that up. Maybe after you get your headpiece done for me, this was good enough. What i did was shape 10 gauge electrical wire that has a black sheath on it into this shape. Here i did a little v, let’s see if you can see this v, i did a little v here so that i could adjust across the top of my head and it would also hide better in my hair and i did little coils where the, where the Horns are going to be contact cemented into place, and these little coils allow for more surface area for the glue to work and also something that i could twist and pivot to adjust how the horns fit on my head. All in all, i was so excited with how these turned out.
They feel fantastic. They stay on. Well, i can adjust them to be tighter. I can hide the uh. I can hide the mounting points in my hair. I can get them the way i want them. I think they look great you gon na eat.
My horns: don’t eat. My horns. Don’T eat my heart. I hope you learned something in this article. If you’d like to see more tutorials like this, be sure to let us know uh, you know i’d be happy to even tackle a little bit of foam smithing, which is armor made out of foam, which, in my opinion, is even a little bit more difficult than Organic sculpting, it’s a little bit less forgiving, just be sure to leave us a comment down below and let us know what you’d like to see.
Once again, i want to thank works for sponsoring this video and thank you for subscribing to the channel hitting the little bell. So you can see what we put out next i’ll see you next time you .