#foam weapons

I went to my first big LARP last summer, namely Drachenfest. While I had gone to a few tavern evenings, I had never really played a full consistent character, so it was a pretty big thing for me.

Beforehand, I prepared a number of things and also tried my hand at building weapons and a shield for the first time.

This was the result.

Below are a few pictures of the process.

I used a hard foam sheet as a core and bolted a piece of a wooden rod to the back as a handle. I used a hollowed out half of a softball as a boss. It was attached to a Plastazote mat. To secure the screws and edges of the core, I used a fibreglass fabric that was soaked in latex. I used a contact glue called Kövulfix, which is intended for use on leather. It deals well with the porous foam and has excellent properties if you want to sand edges for example.

I designed a pattern on paper and after adding the Plastazote to the other side, I mapped out the pattern to make adjustments.

Because I am not particularly good at drawing, I transferred a real wood texture to the surface in order to instead carve the texture into the foam.

I mainly just added the most prominent features of the pattern and freestyles the rest. I used wood carving tools and my trusted Dremel for this. 😊

After that, I added the rest of the embellishments. Which was a pain. (Although I am currently working on a shield that will have almost 150 individual foam rivets on it, so I guess it’s all relative. 😅)

I used different coloured primer for the wood and metal parts. As you can see I take masking off very seriously. I decided flex paints to avoid latex deterioration, which can be a big problem in LARP.

Because I carved the texture into the foam, I was able to paint the wood mostly by dry brushing, and only adding a few details with the brush.

Get you a girl who can do both.

My brother created a company: The Foamory!

He's ventured into the northern woods to slay and skin the greatest of foam beasts, to bring you the largest cuts of EVA foam.

Craft cosplay, make weapons & armor, line your briefcases, safes, and game tables.

Our most simplistic design “Damaged Dirk” for sale on our Etsy store.

Finally got chance to do some more work on the Gloin small axe, Life has a way of spoiling all my fun lol. So, we were at the plasti coating stage, this is not a long one guys as there isn’t too much to this process, I could have taken loads of shots from different angles but at the end of the day..I sprayed and it hung there drying so just the one pic today showing just that. It can’t be exciting all the time right ?? lol. So, I had already sanded, then coated in Modge Podge as shown in the previous ‘set’. Today all I had to do was to put a ‘Hanging wire’ in the axe to hang up whilst spraying and drying, the rest is all about getting those coats on, I usually do at least six, allowing them to dry between each coat. This pic doesn’t show much as it’s not a technical thing to do but it may be useful to see if you’ve never done it before, to see that you don’t need a fancy spray booth or fancy hanging hooks etc, a piece of wire pushed into the end of the handle as shown, a spray can and somewhere to hang it out of the way and warm. luckily we’ve had some hot weather so hanging it in my old plastic green house worked great. ok so here’s the pic. My Axe is looking really shiny, don’t worry about that, it’s just because I wasn’t paying attention when I bought the Plasti-coat and bought the Gloss instead of the Matt..which I prefer. But it did the job, I ended up doing 8 coats to help smooth over some gaps. next step is the painting part, more chances for pics so watch this space for the next installment which will be a bit longer with more pics. Hopefully we will do a nice paint job on this to rival the Astrid axe. Stay Craft and thanks for following.