Oh the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear.....

Still working on Talleg. It is a very looooong work in progress. :/ This is way harder than it looks. Or seems like it should be. Or whatever.

This week I am going to talk about scales. I had decided I was going to put fish scales on her breastplate and upper arms. Fish scales seem so....boring. But they are simple enough.

I was still unsure how I was going to implement that part. Last time I did scales, the leaf scales tore the shit out of the rest of the outfit. I need to fix Aoifa's top before I can ever wear her again.

So I thought about other ways to get the scale look. The first thing I tried was cutting scales on the foam and throwing the heat gun on it. It looked....kind of cheesy. Might work for something else, but this? Nah. Besides which, it wouldn't work for the sleeves.

Even if I cleaned that up, it wouldn't look right. It was an idea. I may try to implement it on something else. But it looks cheesy and would be obvious drawn design on the sleeves. So I decided to scrap this idea for now.

A friend of mine was going to 3d print a fish scale cookie cutter so I could use it as a pattern, but his printer stopped working and doesn't seem fixable. For a while there I was in a quandry. I guess I was just going to have to cut out 500 fish scales and go with that.

Then I went to a meeting. Here in Portland there is an active cosplay community. I have struggled to find anyone who wants to help me or work with me. But I found a group on Meetup.com. It is called the Portland Cosplay Crafter's Association. I went to my first meeting, and it was AWESOME! The people were nice. They are maybe more serious about cosplay than I am. I love to do it, and working with others, but I don'tknow that I would ever want to make a business out of it. But they are talking a cosplay co-op kind of situation. Which I think is a WONDERFUL idea! We can buy supplies bulk for cheaper. We can get together a communal space. We can help each other, fill in gaps in our specialities. This is good. I am all in. And one of them said they have a 3d printer, and if I get something scanable they would print out scales for me.

Eureka! That is awesome and totally waht I need. So I decided instead of going plain fish scale, I would go shark scale. Shark scales are different from fish scales. Shark skin itself feels like sandpaper. That is because shark scales are smaller than fish scales, and pointier.

Photo courtesy of the Australian Musem

Photo courtesy of the Micronesian Conservation Coalition

That looks so badass. After looking at tns and tons of pictures on the interwebtubes, I decided to make then kind of like the one on the left in the picture on the right. So I got to sculpting.

I decided not to make them curved. It would be easier to attach them if they are flat. Also less likely to stick out and hurt people and/or costumes. They kind of look like a cross between shark scales and shark teeth.

I like the way they turned out though. I could I suppose look around and see if I could find an stl file. I might still do that. But I like the idea of everything being my design. I made them out of SuperSculpey, and baked them.

I poked 3 holes in the top. I decided to lace them together kind of like lamellar, though not really lamellar. I will use the side holes to lace them into rows, and the middle hole to lace the rows together. the middle one in this pic was rubed with gilder's wax to see how the design would look finished. I like it.

So now I just gotta get them printed. It is going to take a lot of work, but I think it will be worth it in the end.