I haven't had much time lately for Flight Rising, but I was feeling listless without an all-consuming craft project... so I made a "fur"suit mask of my banescale, Patina!
The neck, hands, and tail are yet to be finished and I need to repair the elastic on their jaw, but I'm pretty happy with them!
They're all EVA foam and foam clay! I have a little bit of the process described on the FR forum, but I started with a pattern by Mantacraft for a Saluki and modified the shape and measurements to add horns and such. After cutting out all the EVA foam segments and gluing them together, it was a lot of sanding, shaping, cutting, and sculpting on top of said base (with respiratory protection - foam dust and fumes are no joke).
I was working with whatever I had on hand (the only thing I technically bought for the project was respiratory protection but I admit that lots of the stuff I have on hand isn't common to have on hand), so there's probably a better way to do most of what I did.
I ended up using a soldering iron to burn texture into the scales before I painted, because cutting in the patterns wasn't making them defined enough. So all the little tiny scratches are a box cutter or chisels, the bigger gouges are a rotary tool (like on the horns, where it "skips" off of the foam), and the deeper but softer marks are the burns. It was a lot of trial and error, and the rotary tool ended up being much less helpful than I thought. While I was lucky enough to have access to tools to speed things up, I think this would be totally doable with just hand tools (box cutter, chisel, sandpaper, something to heat the chisel).
The only really specialized thing was the hinges, which my brother 3D printed for me-- I'm also lucky enough to live by a public library with a 3D printer / makerspace.
The paint is acrylic and spray paint, and some of the texture is from a copper spray paint meant for outdoor furniture! It was a really light dusting of it.
