Hello friends! If you've been following my Instagram or Facebook...you probably already know that I've completed Cassandra! Well I was pretty terrible about doing my writeups on the construction process so I hope to make up for it here. I hope you find this helpful on how I made Cassandra's sword and shield. This will be part 1 of 4.
- Reference-
Of course, you have to start with a reference and a size test. For the reference, I found a 3D model of Cassandra ripped from Soul Calibur 4 and was able to rotate and view it in a free program called XNALara. Honestly this was a god-send! The other images were sort of confusing due to perspective, but with the 3D model I could see exactly where the shield landed and used my own body for measurements. On the right you can see that I printed out the model reference image to full size to check for scale. After the scale was settled, I started with the sword.
- Sword -
Now that I have my reference image for the sword, I knew that I was going to make it out of EVA foam with an aluminum rod down the center for stability without adding to much weight. But I wanted a cleaner template to work from so I drew an outline in my favorite FREE program, Inkscape.
Now, I'm terrible and don't really have very many photos of the building process...but I'll try to explain best I can.
So as I mentioned, there is a aluminum rod in the middle of the blade all the way through the handle. You can normally find these in a hardware store for a pretty reasonable price. To cut it to size, I used my diamond wheel attachment on my dremel.
Safety is super important! When cutting the aluminum rod, I used welding gloves to protect my hands from sparks, wore long sleeves, and had safety glasses and a respirator on.
---- Don't skip out on safety! ----
So the blade was built up using 4 layers of 5mm EVA foam. I knew I was going to add on additional pieces once the main part of the blade was built. To get the sloped shape, I needed to sand it down and using my belt sander. Now, the sloped part of this blade both at the tip and on the sides. Basically all the "silver" parts in the reference image above needed to be sloped. Now when you sand this aggressively, you may have to cover the foam with a skin. So in the above image, you can see that I covered the blade in a layer of 2mm white EVA foam. This evened out the texture and when cut at an angle to give a nice edge to it. Now, I decided to make the cross guard rails separately since it had some additional detailing on it and would have made sanding way worse!
Special mention for the handle here. So the grip for the sword is not just a regular cylinder. Of course it tapers! So to make this, I tried this method first and made a bunch of rings to go around a foam dowel that I was using. However, when I sanded it to a taper, it just got worse and worse. So instead, I glued together 5 layers of 5mm EVA foam together and roughly carved it into shape then smoothed it out on my belt sander (better view is on the picture above). To make the spike on the end, I just used some foam spikes from TNT Cosplay supply. This saved me some time from dremeling it into shape myself.
Now after the blade was shaped, the handle was smoothed, I added additional details on the guard with some 2mm foam and attached it to the base (middle pic above). With my base all done, the final detail was this raised center piece with some weird half-cone shape. I made the cone shape by first making the flat profile of the shape in Inkscape, made a half circle to be used to guide my dome, then cut a larger version of that cone shape and glued it by matching all the edges. Added additional detailing with 2mm foam and glued the center onto it.
The lettering was taken from what Volpin Props did for his Cassandra sword, since I liked his interpretation of the Greek lettering the best. From what I could tell from the reference images, the lettering repeated the same 4 characters over and over again and I thought this was more visually appealing. He says the Greek doesn't translate to anything. To cut out all these TINY letters, I used my new Circuit Maker to cut out all the letters. Then I super glued them onto the center piece. Once all that was glued together, I could attach it to the blade.
For sealing the blade, I first heat sealed it with my heat gun to burn off the fuzzies and prepare it for priming and paint. I used 3 layers of Kwik Seal to fill in the seams. I decided to use Prop Monkey's RAPID FILL and FINE FINISH from TNT Cosplay Supply. I didn't use my usual favorite of Plastidip because it was far too cold where I was to have it dry properly. Rapid Fill and Fine Finish are non-toxic and can be sped up with a hairdryer, it's also sandable, which is really nice. Oh, by the way, the thin rounded strip found on the guard, is apoxy clay that I pushed through one of those clay extruding tools.
So the painting was sort of a nightmare...due to the cold, the paint I used just didn't want to cure correctly. This caused me having to mask and repaint several parts. (Don't buy the silver/chrome paint from Ace Hardware...its bad). The darker pieces are actually a oil-rubbed bronze shade. The gold was Angelus gold paint and was hand painted on with about 3 solid coats. The blue is just an acrylic paint I had on hand and I shaded the sword using a gunmetal gray airbrush paint. The entire thing was sealed with a satin clear coat with a gloss on the blade itself.
- Shield -
Inkscape drawing (left) / Shield dome pieces (right)
For the shield, a lot of the process was the same as the sword. I made an Inkscape drawing to use as a template (left). I cut out 4 different layers of 5mm EVA foam and cut the center at a slight curve. I glued together the halves and glued together layers 1 & 2 together and layers 3 & 4 together, but NOT these two pieces together yet. This made the shield slightly domed from the center. I did made the last two layers were made slightly smaller to allow for a tiered look. I then rounded off the edges which were similar to the reference image. I attached the straps using two strips of leather by cutting through layers 1 & 2 and glued the ends down using Barge to make it very secure once I glue the two pieces together. What was really challenging for this was the curvy symbol on the shield. I used my drawing to cut it out and trace it onto 5mm EVA foam. I marked the center line and dremeled at an angle to round it off.
Here you can see the final dremeled piece both front (right) and back (left). The white pieces are 2mm EVA foam and the lines along the back are burned in using a soldering iron (with a respirator on). The circle on the center-back is just a simple circle cut from 5mm foam and glued using Barge. The thinner line on that piece is just scored using an X-acto blade and opened up using a heat gun. All seams were sealed using Kwik Seal and it was primed just like sword.
Here's a quick view of how much of a pain it was to mask off this shield. The curves presented the biggest challenge since the paint job required 3 different colors.
For the colors, I primarily used spray paint with some airbrush shading. The silver was the same terrible paint used on the blade on the sword. The center of the symbol was a hammered metal spray paint and shaded with gunmetal gray airbrush paint. The pink was a magenta spray paint and edges were cleaned up with silver enamel paint. Sealed with the same satin spray varnish.
- Final Thoughts -
I had so many problems with the paint on this project that it caused a ton of headaches. I'm still pretty pleased with how it came out but next time I would definitely use a different silver/chrome paint. It being pretty cold really made things difficult, so keep that in mind when selecting your painting method.
Next up, the shoulder pauldrons and hip emblem!
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