Among the most discussed topics on any fantasy figure board is the making of armor. No figure is complete without it and no one seems to have any easy method to make it. Let's see if we can change that.
Me, I made my first armored figure when I was ten years old. It was a PH Joe that I turned into my vision of a Roman centurion. The fellows around the neighborhood liked him so much that I made another half dozen in the next week or so.
How does a ten year old kid go about making armor that fast? Well, I was slightly advanced for my age so I made them from cold-poured polyvinyl acetate. lol
Don't bother looking up polyvinyl acetate....I'll save you the trouble. It's good old Elmer's glue. Well, Elmer's is one of the thousands of PVA's on the market, but you get the idea. Buy a bottle of it at any store for $1.49.
PVA's....thermoplastic polymer resins....are used for everything from gluing to reinforcing to molding and casting etc etc etc. Some of the biggest users of PVA these days are in the ancient sciences....paleo, archeo etc. It's used for reinforcing items before removing from the hole and pretty much every step up to and including reassembling and sealing pottery shards for display etc.
Remember those iron-on knee patches our moms used to use on our jeans? Yeppers. You guessed it. PVA.
PVA is and has been used in literally thousands of different ways in our lives and yet no one today uses it for much of anything in our hobby. Why is that? Well, my answer to that question is that it's a mindset that few of us are able to access anymore. We see Elmer's glue and watercolor paints and papier mache etc as being "fit for a child" and so we avoid them on an unconcious level. Problem is, when you discount the easy stuff as being unfit, you end up with a topic that pops up on the boards in frustration more than any other topic.
Never be afraid to experiment! Use your imagination!
Right about now, I'd say "let's build something" and take you through a step by step on making a breastplate or a vambrace or something. This topic is so easy, though, that I think the best thing to do is to just let you go at it on your own. Find out what you can do and what you can't, and we'll talk about the results later.
Grab an old figure of some sort and a bottle of Elmer's and start smearing! Use thin layers and just smear the plain Elmer's all over it's chest. Do at least five layers or to the point that it's 1/16" thick or so. When it's all dried to the semi-transparent end, use your thumbnail to carefully lift the edges of the resin from the figure underneath. It won't stick. Use a pair of scissors or an Xacto blade to trim it.
With it off the figure, seal it well with a dullcoat or spray primer and then use your paint of choice. Trust me. It sounds cheap and too easy to be true but with it sealed properly, that breastplate you just made will last as long as the figure that wears it. I have items I made in my teens that look as good today as the day they were made twenty five years ago.
First tip! If you were making a mask for *you* to wear to a party, would you mold it off of your own face and then simply paint it? Of course not! If you did, it would look exactly like you and probably garner you a good laugh or two. If you wouldn't mold it off of your own face to wear, then why did you just use a CC Joe body to mold that breastplate that you intend him to wear? Don't deny it, we all saw you! lol Find a trashed first generation SOTW fig and do all your molding off of that guy....his body is so unlike any other that he makes a great generic mold to cast off of.
Second tip! You ripped the breastplate when slotting it for a strap! Next time, glue your straps on and don't use the slot method! Scroll down to the pic of the one I did to see what I mean.
Third tip! Wrapping tissue (the stuff that you get ten sheets of for a buck at the Dollar Store) makes a great reinforcement for a PVA armor piece! Go slow and don't layer it to the point that it shows on the final piece. If necessary, you can simply use another coat of the PVA to cover any defect. And before anyone asks, yes, you can use thin cloth saturated with PVA to form items.
If your brand of PVA is turning out a bit tough to remove from the fig as one fellow has mentioned to me, try placing a layer of wrapping tissue over your fig as your first layer and then use a 50/50 mix to soak it down to form. With the tissue as your first layer, you can add the straight PVA over it and it won't stick nearly so much.
If you want to do rigid items, use carpenter's glue. It's a PVA, too. In most cases, if your mold is polished, it won't adhere....but use a quick spray of Pam to be sure! You can even do a few coats of Elmer's and then coat that with carpenter's glue to make a semi-rigid item.
Detail parts and addons can be made with PVA the same way. A good start is to take a sheet of tissue and lay it flat on a nonporous surface and saturate it with some PVA to dry. When dry, you can slice strips and shapes off of it that can make your project into a real gem!
If you have the time and the patience (I don't these days), try using a paperpunch to punch out five hundreds tiny circles from that flat sheet of PVA you made. Wet them slightly with some water and start layering them onto a PVA breastplate. Trust me, it makes some terrific scale mail! The scrapbooking folks can tell you where to find a dozen different shaped paperpunches, too.
Ok, settle down and stop eating the friggin paste! You'd think you guys were kids the way some of you act! lol
Next project! Scrunch-forming!
This is one of my fav techniques.
See that empty two liter drink bottle in the recycle bin? Go and grab that and while you're at it, get a candle, a pair of scissors, a Diet Coke etc and come on back.
Use your scissors to cut that drink bottle into 2" wide bands and then cut those into two or three pieces. Light your candle and take a good swig of the Coke and ask yourself if you *really* want to do this? You do? Ok, take your SOTW fig and sit on him so only his legs are showing between your thighs (no joke)....next, take one of those strips of plastic and *CAREFULLY* heat its middle over the candle until it's soft and floppy between your hands....and when it's just right, take it and scrunch it down hard over the SOTW shin.
You just made a greave. Congrats.
Do the same for the other shin and both forearms and add those to the breast and back plates you made earlier and you have an almost entire Roman.
Remember when we mentioned "easy methods"? You just mastered them.
This one took literally twenty mins besides the PVA drying time....and even that took less than a half hour with the dehydrator. The longest time was for the paint to dry afterward. The breast and back plates are PVA (and yes, it's a CC Joe lol), the shoulders are scrunch-formed off of an SOTW figure, the layered shoulder strap pieces are simply strips of styrene, the rivets are all styrene rod that's inserted into drilled holes and then heat-melted to form the rivets, and the straps and buckles are masking tape and paperclip stock respectively.
Think that one looks decent enough to put on a thief? I do. Pretty danged fine leather armor if I do say so myself.
Plate armor is just as easy. Just scrunch-form a bunch of individual areas and then assemble them into a full suit after. Again, if you use a 1st gen SOTW as your mold, the resulting armor will be large enough to fit pretty much all 1/6 scale figs currently on the market.
One tip to make your scrunch-forming experiences a bit smoother and a whole lot faster is to make your own mold board. It's far easier than it sounds, and once done, you can literally and quite easily scrunch-form an entire suit of armor in an evening.
Everyone of us will have our own favorite method and technique for doing the exact same thing so just take this as a general tip and not a how-to.
For my molds, I trashed a couple of 1st gen SOTW figs. Grab a fig a give him a good twist and bend to break his lower back free from his pelvis and then pop the legs and arms loose from those parts. Take the first chest and drill a good 1" diam hole in the middle of his back and epoxy a 6" dowel into that hole. Get it good and solid so it'll never move again. Do the same to the second chest except drill the hole in the chest so the back is facing up. Drill (holesaw) matching holes in a section of 3/4" board and epoxy those parts into them. Do the same with the arms and legs at different angles but use smaller diam mounting rods of course.
With that mold board, you can simply scrunch each and every part you'll need safely without having to sit on the figure and having the part move on you.
Next step up is vac-forming....something I won't get into in this one since it's been done in another article.
Remember those vac-formed formers your wife or daughter got in that Barbie dress last week? You know, those make great starting points for female armor. Action figs are often packed on vac-formed bubble cards, too....those can be handy.
Helmets? Vac-form or scrunch-form them! Me, I tend to like the realism of a scrunch-formed one since it's pretty much how they were actually made. Vac-forming fits certain things but not helmets in my opinion.
Take an excess CC Joe (carded crewcut is best) and Fimo sculpt a simple conical viking helm onto his head. Stick his neck onto a wooden dowel and bake him as per the instructions on the package. Once cooled, simply scrunch-form four pieces of your drink bottle or sheet styrene onto it....one for each quadrant, of course....and then cut them out and reassemble them into a helmet. Use strip styrene to do your reinforcing bands and paint it. How much easier could that be?
We'd move on to chainmail about now, but several companies have recently released figures that include molded chain....and frankly, it looks just as good as anything you or I would make. If you want to learn how to make chainmail, there are hundreds of tutotials on the web. Just think small lol
Right about now, I'd like to add another blurb for the FantasyNet group and say once more that I think these folks are some of the most creative people I've ever met!
One especially for Dick....try taking a scrapped figure abdomen and seal the shoulder holes with some sheet styrene or some epoxy etc. Seal the waist hole and neck hole, too. To that sealed abdomen, drill a 1/16" diam hole in the neck plug and cyanoacrylate a 6" length of coathanger into place. Bend the top end into a hook that you can hold onto.
What's that suggest to you?
Go on to Lowe's or Home Depot and buy a pint of their tool dipping material and use your dip mold you just made. Make sure you go for the cold stuff and not the hot stuff and *USE PAM* so it doesn't stick! As a rule, pretty much none of them will stick to nonporous materials without a specialty primer but don't take the chance of spoiling your mold. Yes, they come in different colors, too, and they're all paintable. Glue them with CA, paint with acrylics.
A good bald head like the standard carded Joe head can make for some *really easy* helmets when dipped!
Kris wanted me to be sure to warn you about plasticizer leeching, too. Soft plastics like these tool dipping materials contain plasticizers that keep them flexible. By placing those types of materials in contact with other harder plastics like styrene, you will in effect allow plasticizer to leech from soft to hard and cause meltmarks. *ALWAYS* place at least one layer of cloth between soft and hard plastics to prevent that and never store the two in contact with each other!
Another topic that was brought to my attention that I need to clarify a bit is that these techniques aren't a "be all and end all" of armor making. These are simply some techniques that will give you a great start. You won't ever find a can that you can pop the top off of and pour it over a figure and immediately set it on the display shelf as a finished product. It won't happen. You can often start that easy, though.
With PVA and PVC and scrunch-formed armor, you'll get a great, easy start.
To be continued....
Richard 
Kristi