#splintmail

Reference Images

Whenever I start to get serious about making a costume, I’ll boot up whatever game or source material the costume is from, and try to assemble a collection of screenshots I can reference throughout my build.   I keep these in an organized folder, within a main folder for the costume project, as I’ll be looking at these frequently.  Additionally, if I can either track down the game assets in the form of a 3D model file and textures, those can be incredibly valuable.  My goal with the reference images is to create a turnaround for the costume I’m trying to build.  Assuming it’s a symmetrical design, I’ll find shots from the front, side, and back.

Materials and Tools

With the exception of purchasing a few clothing elements or leather pieces, all of which I’ll explain in the corresponding sections, the vast majority of this costume was built using interlocking EVA foam floor mats and Sintra plastic, also known as PVC foam.

EVA foam can be found in the camping section of retail stores. I typically get all of my foam floor mats from Target, and they’re most frequently sold in 4-packs with a 1/2” thickness.  Depending on how efficient your template placement is and how small you are, this project *should* only require one pack of floor mats.  I’m unfortunately a gigantic human and needed more than that. As a side note, foam mats come in a variety of colors, but are typically gray.  Since I needed more foam than one pack would provide, I turned to some older sheets I had lying around that just so happened to be green in color.  This color choice wasn’t intentional, nor does it provide any sort of advantage or secret.  I simply had it and wanted to use it up.  To add onto that, I also used 2mm thick craft foam for adding trim to pieces like the breastplate and backplate of the cuirass and for the lames of the tassets and culet, all of which I’ll explain later, but you’ll want to get some sheets of this, or a large roll of it if you can.

Sintra is a little harder to come by, although Amazon does sell it, albeit at an upcharge compared to my source.  If you’re looking to get into plastics, research your area and try find a plastics manufacturer that sells their scrap plastic pieces to the public.  A showfloor allows you to examine not only Sintra, but other materials like styrene, ABS, acrylic, and more for their size, thickness, flexibility, and appearance before you buy them.  My plastics monger also sells Sintra for a dollar a pound, so I can load up on the stuff for really cheap, hence why I encourage you to look into your area.  If you can’t find a plastics manufacturer nearby, and don’t want to shell out the cash to have the stuff shipped to you, you can absolutely do this with EVA foam or craft foam.  Just make sure you take into account the thickness of the material before moving forward.

This stuff obviously doesn’t stick together without a little help, so let’s talk adhesives.  For binding the foam pieces together, I used Barge contact cement.  It can be ordered off of Amazon, though leatherworking stores like Tandy Leather also carry it.  However, due to the toluene component of it, some countries may not allow this item.  I’ve heard Alpha Thixofix is a fair alternative if you’re UK-based.  For everything regarding the plastic, I used cyanoacrylate, which is just a fancy term for super glue.  I always get mine from HobbyTown USA, opting for the 4oz bottles, which can be found alongside cans of accelerant.  I highly recommend picking a can of this up as well, since the aerosolized compound will cause the glue to instantly cure, making your job on the massive amount of rivets on the splintmail that much easier.

Speaking of which, the rivets I used on this costume are resin half-beads. It’s common for cosplayers to use googly eyes for rivets, since they’re cheap and appropriately sized.  However, given the sheer number of rivets the splintmail has, every step in a costume covered with googly eyes would have turned me into a human maraca, which led me to look into alternatives.  I ordered bags of two sizes of black resin half-beads— about 800 6mm half-beads and a little over 300 12mm half-beads—  from a Chinese seller on eBay that sells these half-beads in bags of 1,000, and I was incredibly happy with the result.  Also, these things are super cheap, so I can’t think of a reason not to get them, especially considering I’ve used them to simulate rivets on more costumes than just this one.  (A little note on these: Given the nature of inventory and sellers shuffling around on eBay, this link may appear broken from time-to-time.  I’ll do my best to keep it updated with a close approximation as I see it, but I apologize for the potential link/information inaccuracy!)

You’re also going to need belts.  Lots of belts.  I use belts not only as they’re shown on the splintmail, but also as straps to hold the pieces of armor together.  I think I drove around to all of the thrift stores in my area several times after starting this project, and had liberated them of all of their brown leather belts. Genuine leather would be best, since the fake stuff won’t hold up as well, but keep in mind that the aesthetic of this costume is incredibly worn, and pristine belts will not only be more expensive, but may hurt that look.  Also, something to note is that the belts I use to go around the waist are a bit bigger than my actual waist size, considering they’re surrounding both me and a few layers of foam armor.  These are the only two belts in the entire costume that I actually splurged a little on and made sure to match, since they’re worn right next to one another, and look identical on the model.

To cut all of the materials in this build, I used a sharp, retractable hobby knife.  Do yourself a favor and get a blade sharpener, as foam dulls sharp blades at an alarming rate, and a sharpener will keep your cuts clean and prevent you from having to change blades constantly.  All of the shaping and tooling on the foam was done using a rotary tool, mostly with sanding bits, but I also used a cutting wheel to simulate damage on the materials.  To lay out the initial grooves for the tooling on the Sintra, I used a few metal picks.  A heat gun is also pretty necessary for this build, given the amount of shaping to be done.  No, a hair dryer won’t cut it.  Get yourself a heat gun if you don’t have one already.  A base model is relatively cheap, and can be found at nearly all hardware stores or online.

Paint is a pretty important part of this build, so let’s talk about some of the supplies you’ll need for that, starting with the paint itself.  Acrylics are the type I use for everything that doesn’t come out of a rattle can.  The five types of acrylics I used are Thalo Silver, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Raw Sienna, and Yellow Ochre.  I also had a cheap old jug of “dark brown” from my first splintmail build still kicking around, but this was only for use as a thinned down wash to add some further weathering into the cracks of the faux leather armor bits.  To apply all of the paints, I used a small foam roller, a larger brush, a fine-tipped detail brush, and a chunky old sea sponge.  As far as spray paints are concerned, you’ll want to pick up a can or two of primer(I prefer a neutral gray), one or two cans of oil-rubbed bronze, and some matte finish clear coat.  A word of advice is to try your best to pick up the same brand for whatever spray paints you’ll be using, since there’s a chance of bad things happening to your paint finish if you mix brands.  I stick with Krylon if I can, since their brand is made for plastic and it has a relatively short cure time.

Finally, and most importantly, don’t be stupid.  Never risk your lungs or your eyes over a costume.  Ever.  Get yourself a pair of safety goggles and a respirator.  Zero arguments.  Barge contact cement releases a pretty vile concoction of fumes, and the gratuitous amount of sanding and grinding this project will bring on will kick up a whole lot of foam particulate into the air, so don’t breathe that, and don’t let it hit you in the eyes.  Protect yourself.

There are a few other miscellaneous materials here and there, but I’ll address those in the appropriate sections.

 Leather Armor

Considering the majority of the metal armor pieces will be glued onto the surface of the leather armor panels on the splintmail, it makes sense to start with the EVA foam bits first.

While I can’t give you exact measurements you’ll need for your templates, since I know for a fact everyone making this costume isn’t 6’4” and a shape that implies the consumption of way too many cheeseburgers, I can provide you with the basic shapes your templates should be.  Just scale them to your own body’s dimensions, which I know is way easier said than done.  Sorry, friend.  One tip I can give you that very much helped me is a technique for more accurately measuring the amount of foam you’ll need around a surface.  Since EVA foam has a thickness to it, it’ll affect the amount you actually need to curve around a surface, whereas something like measuring tape simply measures the surface with no account for material thickness. To combat that, take two of the jigsaw edges that separate from the mat proper, combine them to form what basically looks like a closed zipper.  After gluing those together, take a ruler and transfer the measurements directly onto that.  This gives you a flexible ruler the exact thickness of the foam you’ll be cutting and shaping, and should make figuring out just how much foam you need to wrap around your torso to make that leather cuirass that much easier.

With all of your measurements accounted for and your templates created, start transferring those patterns onto your foam with a marker, making sure to label them as you go, differentiating between the left and right pieces when necessary.  This may all require some “Tetris-ing”, as you try to want to utilize the most surface area you can from the foam for your armor, letting as little go to waste as possible.

When you’re ready to start cutting your pieces apart, make sure your knife is sharp.  The sharper the knife, the cleaner the cut, and the less smoothing you’ll have to do later, which could affect how clean your lines are when you have to press fit two pieces together with glue, such as with the pauldrons.

Speaking of, when you’re planning on match-fitting two surfaces together like that, take into account the angle at which they’ll meet.  When cutting, you may need to angle your blade slightly so when you start gluing, there’s less of a seam, and an overall clean line.  Honestly, I could sit here and try to explain it as best as I can, but Ted Smith on YouTube already does a much better job of explaining how to work with EVA foam than I can.  Bill Doran is also an incredible resource for learning foam, and he has his Foamsmith e-book series available.  I’d recommend picking it up and giving it a read.

Once all of your parts are liberated from your floor mats, it’s time to start sanding.  If you have a belt sander, it should chew through the foam pretty rapidly, making your job quicker, but since there’s so much flex in EVA foam, you do want to be careful.  The alternative is to use a rotary tool with a sanding bit(one that’s been worn down a bit will be gentler on your foam) followed by some fine grit sandpaper to smooth things out.

When you’re ready to start heat forming the foam into more of the shape the armor will have in its final state, you’ll want to grab your heat gun and heat the back of the piece you want to shape.  Keep the heat gun moving so you don’t burn or melt your foam, and when it’s pliable enough, start flexing it with your hands to get it into the shape you want it in. For tighter curves, I tend to shape the pieces over my knee.  Do keep in mind that while the foam will more or less stay in the shape you bend it to, it will have a tendency to loosen up a bit, so I’ve gotten in the habit of putting slightly more bend into them than I want in the end.

With your pieces curved and shaped, your previously flat foam shapes should start looking a little more like armor.  Time to bind them together.  Barge contact cement has become the glue of choice for people using foam to build costumes.  Though you could use hot glue to affix your parts together, for the purposes of this tutorial I’ll be using Barge.  The gist of using the stuff is to brush it onto the two surfaces you intend to stick together, and let them dry for five minutes until the glossy surface turns dull and flat.  At that point, press an end of the two pieces together, and work your way along the seam slowly, pressing the materials together to join them all the way to the other end.  That’s basically it.  Repeat this for all of your seams.

In the case of the breastplate and backplate, as well as all of the lames (horizontal bands that stack)of your tassets(hip armor) and culet(butt armor), there’s a shallow lip on the outer edge.  I simply used 2mm craft foam to add this trim, affixing it with the same contact cement method.

Your foam armor should be looking a lot more like armor and less like a bunch of foam at this point, but still far from looking like leather.   Before we get into painting, there’s some surface prep work to take care of.  Look over your seams and if you need to do any additional sanding to get that surface looking right, now is the time to do it.  It certainly happened to me regarding the dart at the top of the breastplate, right by the neck where it was creating just too much of a point.

One optional thing you can do is to add some battle damage to your parts.  Take your knife and the cutting wheel on your rotary tool, and start adding some cuts and dings into the surface.

When you’re certain everything is looking satisfactory, grab your heat gun once again, and very lightly go over the outer surface with the heat, keeping the gun in motion.  What this does is fuses the cells of the foam together, closing them and creating a less porous surface, which means it’ll drink less of the paint we’re going to apply, making sure you have a lot less layers to get through when applying the paint.  You’ll see the texture on the surface change from dull to satin as you go, and if you made any cuts to simulate battle damage, running the heat over them will cause them to open a little further.

I can’t take full credit for the following techniques, since it’s something I saw Steven K. Smith do for his Inquisitor costume, and the effect was almost exactly what I wanted, so I followed his steps almost to the letter.

The first step is to pick up a container of Mod Podge.  This stuff is basically like a slightly thinned down school glue that most people use for scrapbooking and for collages.  It’ll give the surface of the foam a dull sheen, not unlike leather. Additionally, if the finish winds up wrinkling, creasing, or cracking a little bit because of this step, real leather has wrinkles and small cracks sometimes as well, so no sweat.

From there, apply a coat of primer.  One tip for hanging all of the parts is to cut the little jigsaw-like nub edges left over from the foam, and glue them onto the back of your pieces where you won’t see them.  You can attach a clamp to this and hang that from somewhere.

When your primer is dry, apply a base coat of raw umber with your large brush.  Afterwards, grab your sea sponge and the burnt umber, and start dabbing some light texture onto your foam pieces, and after that, the raw sienna, using that lighter color more sparingly as you sponge it on.  Real leather, especially really well-used and worn leather, has some great color and texture differences, and isn’t just “brown”. It’s an organic material, and organic materials have imperfections.  This random texture sponging will create variations in color that happen naturally. That said, however, I did tend to be mindful of where the edges of each piece sat, and tried to create a gradient with my lighter colors more or less centralized, just because I thought it looked good.  Also, if you want to prevent your fingers and hands looking like you were digging around in the mud, wear some gloves.  It’s a messy process.

To help further the effect of this armor being well used, mud, dirt, grime, and the like will gather in grooves, creases, and cuts in the leather, creating darker areas.  To apply this, I made absolutely certain my previous paint layers were completely dry, then took that generic “dark brown” acrylic paint, and added water to it until it was the consistency of milk.  Grab some paper towel or a rag if you don’t mind getting really dirty, and start brushing on that thinned brown paint.  Let it sit for about a minute or so, and then wipe off your armor piece.  What this does is remove the surface the dark brown from the surface, showing off that nice sponged texture you just applied, all while adding more contrast to the imperfections to create wear and texture.

For any dings and scratches that I wanted more emphasis on than what the wash provided, I took a fine bristle brush and carefully brushed some unthinned dark brown acrylic into them.   Repeat this throughout the rest of your leather armor pieces, and when you’ve finished, spray them with your clear coat.

Congratulations! You’ve made some cool looking leather armor out of floor mats!

Splints and Metal Plates

As the namesake suggests, the bulk of the protection from this armor comes from the metal splints that cover its surface.  While each armor piece has its own distribution of these splints, I feel a general explanation of cutting them out, shaping them, and painting them deserves its own section.

I used 3mm thick Sintra for all of the metal pieces throughout this costume.  Before you do any cutting, you’ll want to take a ruler and measure out all of the splints you’ll need, and I found that even though the ends of each splint are rounded, plotting out the overall dimensions as rectangles to be easier in the long run.  If you look at my patterns, you’ll notice the splints are labeled with letters.  These correspond to varying lengths depending on their location.  For example, the top of the breastplate features splints that become shorter as they follow the curve towards the armpits.  The overall dimensions will vary for you, depending on the size of your body and armor, but you can see the relative size variation here:

Do note the A rivet distribution will be the same for all splints—two large rivets and four small rivets—except for the G splint, where there’s only one, central large rivet, and four small rivets.  These G splints are for the tasset and culet lames, with the exception of two of the splints on the bottom row of the codpiece, which are the same size, but retain the two large rivets.  I’ll address all of that later in this write-up.  I should note that I did find it incredibly handy to take the extra time to measure out extra lines for the rivet placements so I didn’t have to guess later.  With all of the splints still uncut, this is the optimal time to do the extra measuring. In a similar vein, you’ll want to make a template for each splint that you can easily trace onto your Sintra with a pen, pencil, or marker.  This will make it easier to sand those edges down evenly later.

Once all of the splints are mapped out, you’ll want to start cutting them apart.  I did this with a sharp hobby knife, and a lot of patience, starting by scoring my cutting line along my metal ruler, and then going back over that line with the knife until I separate the pieces.  Repeat on the remaining splints until your hands are sore. Another tip I can offer is to either label the back of each splint with the corresponding letter, or to keep them in labeled bags or boxes, just so there isn’t any question regarding which splint is which size.  Trust me, you’ll have so many by the end of this project that they’ll all start to blend together after awhile.

Once you have your rectangular splints all cut apart, you’re going to want to remove those edges.  If you have a belt sander or disc sander, LUCKY YOU!  Get to work on blitzing those corners off down to the lines you traced earlier from your template outlines.  If you’re like me and don’t have a sander, grab your rotary tool and sanding drum, and get ready to get covered in PVC foam dust(you remembered your safety glasses and respirator, right?)  Go round off those corners.  Regarding the metal plates like the boots and the rerebraces(those metal plates above the elbow), you’ll want to cut them out just like you did the splints, and then round the edges off completely.

If that wasn’t enough torture, it’s time to grab your metal picks and carve a channel into the top of each splint about 1/8”(about 4mm) from the outer edge, and do your best to keep it even.  I found that wearing some gloves lessened the wear on my hand from the knurled bit of the picks.  The boot plates, rerebraces, and gauntlet plates all have a round design carved into them.  I grabbed a circular object that had a circumference close enough to what I could tell from the game, traced that outline, and then sketched in the remaining design within that circle.  From there, I free-hand carved the design into the Sintra with the same picks.

After you’ve powered through that task, it’s time to glue on your rivets. As I stated above, the majority of the splints on this costume use two large rivets and four small rivets.  If you measured out the placement of your rivets, this is where you’ll start thanking yourself.  Add a small amount of glue to your intended placement on the splint, doing your best not to use too much, or it’ll squeeze out around the bottom of the rivet when you press it down, resulting in a pillowed effect.

I would recommend doing each rivet one at a time, since super glue does tend to have a limited working time.  Since the rivets can be a little difficult to pick up, I got in the habit of lining up a few rows on my work surface, licking my finger, and touching it to the top of the rivet.  This should create a loose bond, allowing you to lift and position the rivet over your glue, and press it straight down.  Feel free to hold it there until the glue begins to set, or if you have the accelerant I mentioned in the materials section, just give it a little spritz, and your rivet should be secure.  Repeat this method hundreds of times until all of your splints have rivets and you’ve lost your mind, assuming none of the previous steps did that. While the boot plates are free of any rivets, the rerebraces have three large rivets on either outer edge.  The whole splint process should follow this order:

After I finished all of those splints and metal pieces, I opted to add some battle damage to them, since the splintmail in Dragon Age: Origins is the first suit of armor my Warden recruit got, I can only assume it was probably passed down from plenty of other recruits who eventually upgraded or met an unfortunate end.  It’s also the gear Alistair’s wearing when the player first meets him in Ostagar, and he strikes me as pretty clumsy.  What I’m trying to say is that this stuff is probably pretty beat up more than the textures circa 2009 show.  To achieve the dings, cuts, and scratches, I used both the cutting wheel on my rotary tool as well as those picks again.

You’ve probably noticed at some point that the Sintra isn’t as flexible as your EVA foam is, and tends to resist pressure a little bit more.  While this isn’t a problem for relatively straight pieces of foam like the backplate and most of the breastplate, areas like the codpiece and the tops of the pauldrons have more of a curve than the Sintra will naturally allow.  The same is true for the boot plates and rerebraces. The way we’ll get around this is with a heat gun.  As a forewarning, if you start to melt or burn Sintra, chlorine gas is being released. I don’t think I have to explain why this is a VERY BAD THING, so don’t do it, or all the hard work you did so far will be for naught.  When you’re heating up Sintra, try to heat the back of the piece you intend to bend, as the heat may distort your details you spent so long carving in, and keep the heat gun moving continuously to avoid burning or melting it.  Once it’s softened up a bit, bend your piece lightly over the foam area you intend to eventually glue the splint to, and hold it there until it cools off.  This should set the curve of the piece.  As for the larger metal pieces, I formed them loosely over my calf and bicep, since that’s where the pieces’ll be worn.  The smaller ones were formed over the leather knee and elbow cops, or straight onto my gauntlets while I wore them.

One other metal element I haven’t mentioned in this section are the six caps for the tasset lames(the layered bands that protect the hips), and the six for the culet lames(the layered bands that protect your butt).  All of the aforementioned techniques apply, but they’re a little more involved, mostly due to those fancy S-shapes.  I went about this by making a basic box of Sintra that would fit snugly over the foam base for the tasset lames.  After I was confident with that, I carved a frame for the top of that box, and then the basic S-shape after that.   Before getting into beveling those edges, repeat this eleven more times, keeping in mind that six of the S-curves face one way, and the other six face the other way. Using your rotary tool, shape those pieces and clean them up with sandpaper.  Glue the frame onto the box, and the S-shape inside of that frame, fill any gaps with super glue(or body filler like Bondo if necessary), sand those edges flush, and you’ve got yourself a genuine…lame cap?

So you have a whole bunch of completed splints and a few chunks of armor, huh?  Pat yourself on the back because that’s seriously a lot of work, but they look pretty great, right?

Let’s talk paint and how we’re gonna approach painting all of this stuff.

Either use some large pieces of cardboard, or go pick up a few of those tri-fold cardboard display pieces schoolchildren use for presentations and the like.  You’re going to do some way cooler stuff than their baking soda and vinegar volcano documentation for their science fair project anyway.

Got your cardboard? Good.  I attached them with the same super glue as I used for the rivets. Two small dabs onto the back of each splint should do it.  Just hold the splint in place on the cardboard for several seconds until the glue sets, and get the next one in place.  I made sure to leave enough of a gap between the pieces that I could still get a spray paint stream in there.  Also, it might be useful to keep your different sizes grouped together to avoid confusion on which is which.  If you want to be smart about conserving your super glue, you could probably use hot glue instead, which would probably peel off of the backs of the Sintra pieces easier, but either should be effective.

Once you have your sheets of cardboard with a bunch of plastic glued to it, confuse your neighbors by prepping the pieces with some primer.  I used a medium gray since it was the closest to the final color I wanted, but there are going to be so many layers of paint on these things that I don’t think a different shade is going to ruin the look.  A note for the larger metal pieces: super glue a foam piece to the back of the piece, just like you did for your foam leather pieces, so your clips have something to grab onto while you paint, if you want to make sure you get all of the edges that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to paint if they weren’t hanging.

Harrison Krix.  He’s a veritable god in the cosplay and propmaking community for his absolutely stunning craftsmanship and paintjobs.  He has an e-book out that details how to achieve professional results.  I HIGHLY recommend picking this book up if you want to up your game.  There’s such a wealth of knowledge inside.  Why bring up Harrison and his book?  This paintjob and the eventual rust that’ll top it are techniques he lists in the aforementioned book, and the results speak for themselves, and I absolutely feel like those results were worth the $8 eBook.

For your base coat, you want to grab a can of Krylon Oil-Rubbed Bronze paint.  If you can’t find Oil-Rubbed Bronze, gloss black will also work, but the very slight warm sheen you get from the bronze really helps sell this effect in my opinion.  It’s worth finding a place that sells it(I tend to get mine from Michael’s).

“But, Kevin, the armor is supposed to be silver-colored, not dark bronze!”

While this is true, when you’re going for a metallic finish with high contrast, you want to start with a glossy, dark color, and then apply your metallic color over the top of that. The difference in contrast really sells the effect, and the smoother the surface and the glossier your base coat, the more metallic your top coat will be.

After your base coat is fully cured, grab your silver acrylic and apply it onto the splints using your foam roller.  Don’t press it down heavily into the pieces, since you want some of that warm, dark bronze color to show through and provide that nice contrast.  Looks nice, yeah?  Looks pretty lightly worn, but more or less new.

Curious why you don’t just spray it silver and call it a day?  Here:

The first is a tasset cap sprayed with a hammered silver metallic directly over the primer coat.  The second shows the process we just used, though I did need to use a sea sponge to dab in some of the silver around the shallow bits or it would have just looked like the bronze because the roller can’t dip down into there.

Let’s further that weathering by making them look even more aged.  Grab your sea sponge, and working from dark to light, go through your shades of brown, dabbing those metal plates with “mud”, “dirt”, “grime”, and various other elements of wear.  That’s more or less what you’re simulating here.

When you’re done, it should look like you’re creating something more akin to what you’d stumble across in Fallout than Dragon Age, right?  This is where the magic happens.  Grab that silver paint and your foam roller, and roll a top coat of silver over all of that grunge.

It’s incredible just how sandwiching a series of blobby brown textures between two coats of silver paint can really sell this all as aged metal, right?  Hit these babies with some matte clear coat, and we’ll move onto the final step.

With the amount of blood, moisture, grime, and other elements the armor in Dragon Age endures, combined with the fact that it doesn’t look like anyone is meticulously maintaining the finish on that splintmail, rust is bound to happen.  You can see some rust-colored textures on the model if you look close, but even if it’s not there, rust tells a story, and I wanted to put it on my armor.  Feel free to skip this step if you’d like, or paint on your rusty bits, but you’re honestly missing out.

Since you can’t have rust without metal, and our simulated metal is nothing more than plastic, we’re going to need some help.  Once again, this technique comes from Harrison in his painting and weathering book.

Enter the ferrous powder.  This is a metal powder that will react to a caustic solution and will bring on the rust we want to see.  Harrison’s recipe for the reactive solvent is as follows:

               -6 parts hydrogen peroxide

               -2 parts vinegar

               -1 part salt

               -1 part lemon juice

You’ll want to mix this up in a cheap spray bottle because this caustic mixture will more or less clog up and ruin your spray bottle you use it in.  To apply the ferrous powder, apply a little soapy water to the areas you want to affect, and use a brush to lightly tap out a little sprinkle of the powder over those surfaces.  Once all of the areas you intend to rust up are powdered, mist them with your solvent, and lay your cardboard down flat for 24 hours.  When you come back to your metal bits, depending on the amount of powder you applied, you should have some real rust waiting for you.  If you want your splintmail to look like it’s really been through hell, feel free to seal that rust in with another layer of clear coat. If you’re going for a more metered approach, however, grab a toothbrush and a Scotch Brite pad, and lightly buff away the topmost layer of rust.  Do be careful not to press too hard, or you’ll actually start peeling away your paintjob that you so worked so hard to achieve.

When you’re done, it should look like you did some really basic upkeep on fighting the rust your armor accumulated.  Take better care of your future armor.  Gosh.

Apply one last layer of matte clear coat, and you have yourself a whole bunch of fake metal pieces that really look like they’ve seen some combat in the Blight.  Just peel them off of your cardboard slats, and you’re ready to super glue those babies onto your leather armor pieces.

What I did to prep for the marriage of those two elements is to use my metal picks to score the surface of the foam, creating channels for the glue to really bite into.

Specific Costume Elements

Since the vast majority of the costume elements on this involve using the same techniques, I figured I would provide them with their own general section.  The following sections touch on specific costume elements and any details therein that may require further clarification.

Cuirass

The splintmail cuirass(a term describing a joined breastplate and backplate) is the largest section of armor on this build.  When shaping the breastplate in particular, I found one way to get the curvature over the top of the chest was to take my rotary tool with a sanding bit, and grind a shallow V into the back of the foam in order to make it retain that shape.

The side panels are made from a leather hide I bought from Tandy Leather.  I cut and dyed this myself using Fiebing’s Professional Dark Brown dye.  I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of leatherworking, but do note that you can use pleather/vinyl or even craft foam(though you’ll want to be careful not to tear it when putting it on/taking it off) if leatherworking is too expensive and or intimidating(believe me, I was incredibly nervous about it before a friend showed me the basics, so there’s no shame in not using actual leather).

You may have noticed that the reference images have two straps on either side panel and I didn’t include that on my costume.  I didn’t bother including this detail since my arms are covering those spots 90% of the time, but I may eventually grab some leather belts, cut some holes into the leather, slide them through those holes, and glue them to the underside of the leather panels, but with other projects needing to be finished in my life right now, adding four belts to a costume hanging on a mannequin in my living room is pretty low on the list of things to do.

For the shoulder straps, I used blocks of EVA foam for the pads, and took the rings off of my first suit of splintmail for use on the new one.  I think I bought them at Jo-Ann Fabrics, but these should work just fine as well.  I personally used 40mm diameter rings, but I also understand I’m a huge human being(6’4”), so your mileage may vary. Regardless, you’ll need 8 rings in total(four for each strap).  To attach my shoulder pads to the rings, and the rings to the cuirass, I took a belt and cut thin straps from this.  Once I found an ideal length to place them at for the cuirass to sit properly on my torso, I marked that off, trimmed them down, and after threading the small straps through the rings first(each ring gets two), I punched a hole and riveted the strap to itself, creating a leather loop around the ring.  Once each ring had two leather tags hanging off of it, I glued those leather strips to the pad with Barge(super glue should work just fine, too), and finally the shoulder pad assembly to the front and back of the cuirass. It may sound complicated, but it should be a lot easier by looking at the reference images as you go.

Finally, as I stated earlier in this guide, there are two leather belts that are worn over the top of the cuirass.  Now technically if you look at the reference images, the splintmail has the wearer wearing them at the very bottom of the cuirass, but I found that not only would that be hard to stay in place where I could also remove them, but wearing them over my stomach(I try to center them over the bottom row of splints on the cuirass) helps to…slim down my figure a bit(it makes me look less chubby, okay?).

Arming Doublet and Pants

Honestly, I don’t really know what to call this garment precisely, but for all intents and purposes of this guide, I’m just going to call it a doublet.  A lot of people I’ve talked to think this element is chainmail, but if that’s the case, why does the texture look so different than the actual chainmail texture in the game?  Historically speaking, wool was an incredibly common fabric both for day-to-day wear and for use under armor, and this texture definitely looks like a loose woolen weave to me.  With that out of the way, I opted to use an actual wool jumper for my doublet, because I’m a stickler for details(apparently another term for “lunatic”). Unfortunately it looks like the jumper I have is discontinued as of writing this guide.  It was made by Hawick Knitwear over in Scotland, so feel free to check yourself if they wind up picking up production on it again in the future.  The difficulty in the screen accuracy of that garment is finding something that looks like loose knit wool with a high collar and no visible cutlines in the fabric for the neck.  If you do some browsing and do stumble across something that has all of those qualities, please let me know, so I can update this guide.  A passable substitute might be something like this pullover.  If you’re not bothered by the lack of a high collar, this quilted thermal set should work. It’s what I used for my original splintmail for years, and I still use the pants to this day(given how hot and itchy my wool jumper gets, particularly when I’m in Atlanta in the summer for Dragon Con, I didn’t want to commission wool pants).  If you’ve found a pullover you like and just want the quilted thermal pants, these are the exact ones I have, though I’ve sponged just a very slight amount of wear onto them to match them to the color of my jumper.

I’ve modified the shoulders of my wool jumper with some snaps that I can easily attach my pauldrons to.  To do this, I cut two squares of leather, hammered a two-piece snap to the top layer, punched stitch lines around the edge, and then hand-stitched them to my jumper, keeping the wool sandwiched between the two pieces of leather.  Repeat this for the other side, and you have some quick snaps to hold your armor up comfortably.  If you don’t want to go that route, you could probably use Velcro, but make sure it’s sew-on Velcro, or you’re going to have a really bad time if you use the adhesive kind. Even with the sew-on stuff, you may encounter some frustration with your pauldrons peeling off of your arms, but I’ve just never had the best of luck with Velcro, so follow your crafting heart.

Pauldrons

So what are pauldrons? Simply put, it’s armor that protects the majority of your shoulder(not to be confused with spaulders, which provide less shoulder coverage). With my pauldron build, I opted to split the foam pieces into several sections.  Why do this?  I can better control the angles I want with more segments, especially since they curve in multiple directions.  It’s fairly similar to why I carved a groove into the back of the breastplate.  Just make sure that you line up each of your pieces together as carefully as possible when gluing so you have minimal seams. The splints that go on top of the pauldrons will help, but they won’t completely hide your crimes.

When I originally planned out the pauldrons, I wanted to keep them articulated, much like you’d find in an actual pair of pauldrons, as it helps increase the range of motion of the wearer while keeping him or her protected.  To accomplish this, I glued a belt to the underside of the pauldron, setting a snap into the top end, which fit into the corresponding snap on my arming doublet.  However, I had some frustration in practice, and wound up gluing the upper and lower pauldron pieces together as one piece after the belt had problems staying glued to the pauldron assembly.  BEFORE YOU DO THIS, however, I would encourage you to make a slight modification to the strap that attaches the pauldron to the shoulder.  I had a major failure with this the first time I wore the new suit of splintmail to a convention, and had to make a big modification on site using a knife and some superglue.  I basically separated the upper and lower pauldrons, cut a slit the width of the belt into the lower pauldron on the side nearest to shoulder and another one slightly further down, and fed the belt and snap through both, keeping both ends on the underside.  Then I glued the rest of the belt to the top of the lower pauldron, and then glued the upper pauldron over that, sandwiching the belt between the two pieces, with a small section of the strap hanging out to attach to the jumper, and the other to glue to the backside of the rerebrace(that metal plate that protects the outside of your upper arm).  I honestly should have done this from the beginning, but I found out the hard way.  Learn from my mistakes.  If this seems complicated, it’s basically the same way belts are fed over and under the bracers, which I’ll get to later.

To keep the pauldron from flopping about on the top of your arm, you’ll need a strap to secure it around your biceps.  I bought some antiqued buckles from eBay, attached them to two belts, and glued those belts to the rerebraces.  With these straps, your pauldrons should more or less stay firmly in place on the outside of your shoulders and arms.

Elbow Cops and Knee Cops

Whether you call them elbow cops and knee cops or couters and poleyns is up to you, but they protect the outsides of those joints.  I made mine out of the same leather hide as I used for my cuirass’ side panels, but you could easily make these out of EVA foam and belts or spandex straps(although I did this on my first set of splintmail, and the spandex would saw into my skin throughout the day, leaving the inside of my elbows and knees pretty raw). As far as the leather goes, particularly with the elbow cops, my friend Adi helped me out with the pattern he used for the same parts on his Zevran costume.  While it’s not screen accurate, I’ve found it to be much more comfortable and less prone to slipping than in my first splintmail set.  The basic premise is to rivet two rectangles of leather together, facing the same direction, and then feed a belt with two buckles through that pocket. The other side has a matching belt with holes punched in, stitched to a half-dome.  I got the shape for this and the corresponding one on the knee cops by soaking the pieces in hot water to get them flexible, and then stretched them over something in the shape I wanted them to take, wrapping them carefully and gently in a fabric bandage(if it’s too tight, you might press some of the wrap’s texture into the surface of the leather), and let that sit until it had fully dried.  Depending on what you use for your buck(the item you form your pieces over) and how many of that item you have, this may take you a few days to fully form all four pieces, so plan accordingly.

Before I get too far ahead of myself, I should talk about dying these pieces, since you want to have your colors set before you start attaching things together.  All of the brown pieces were dyed using the same Fiebings’s Professional Dark Brown dye as the side panels, but the green parts were a combination of the brown die(applied first, lightly), Fiebing’s Professional Green Dye(applied on top of the brown), and then a few layers of watered down olive drab acrylic paint(I was having a frustratingly hard time getting that color right) until I achieved the color I wanted.

I thought about doing the same procedure for wearing the knee cops as I did for the elbow cops, but to avoid them falling down my leg while wearing them at a convention, I opted to stitch the things straight to the chaps, since this is the only costume I use the chaps for. I’ll cover the chaps in a later section. Attaching them was…complicated.  I wanted to avoid glue because of all of the walking I do at any given convention, I didn’t want to worry about the bond potentially failing and my knee armor being useless.  There’s a leather wrap, a leather band, and the knee cop itself, and I used a combination of riveting and hand stitching.

If you’re using leather and want to save yourself a potential headache of trying to squeeze stitches around rivets and the like, stitching it all together with one series of stitches might work best, so long as you can line up your punched holes over four pieces of material.   After punching all of my holes, I stitched one side of the cop to the leather band, lined up the corresponding holes on the chaps, leather leg wrap, and the leather band on that same side, and set the two rivets on that side.  Then I stitched the other side of the cop to the band, followed by squeezing the remaining rivets into place.  Setting them is going to be easier said than done, and it took me a few attempts, but it’s possible to do.  You could theoretically set all four rivets and then do your last line of stitches on the rest of the knee cop, but squeezing a needle and leatherworking thread through there sounded more difficult than setting two rivets. Unfortunately, I don’t have any progress pictures of this, which might have cleared things up a bit better than my awful word picture does.

Chaps

Apart from the modification to the knees, nothing special was done to the chaps I bought.  I’d suggest shopping around for what best suits you, especially since the ones I own have been discontinued for years now.  Keep in mind that leather chaps are going to likely set you back around $80-$100 if you shop around, unless you get lucky and manage to stumble across a sale.  You could certainly make your own if you’re dedicated enough, but when I started my first Alistair costume, I barely knew what I was doing, and working with leather was absolutely out of the question for me.

That said, these look to be quite close to the ones I have, and these are certainly acceptable as well as long as you don’t mind the gussets on the inner thighs, which don’t match the chaps on the splintmail model.

Make certain you pay close attention to the measurements of the chaps.  They’re incredibly important for determining how yours will fit!

Codpiece, Tassets, and Culet

Much like the pauldrons, my original intent with the tassets(hip armor) and the culet(butt armor) was to keep the lames(those layered, horizontal bands) articulated, just like you’d find to be a feature of real tassets and culets on real suits of armor.  However, I had issues with them angling improperly, so I just glued all three lames together to create one piece for each section.  To suspend them properly, I took some belts, folded over a section of it to create a loop, and stitched that into place. Two of these straps were glued to each piece of armor surrounding the waist(four parts and eight belt loops in total), and I thread these pieces onto a brown leather belt that I wear just below my cuirass when I’m putting on the costume.

Boots and Boot Wraps

I’ll state this up front that I’m overdue for new boots.  The ones I currently have are vinyl instead of real leather, and with the vast majority of the costume getting pretty substantial upgrades, my footwear should have been upgraded as well, if nothing else for the fact that I spend so much time on my feet when I’m in my splintmail.  Any relatively mundane brown leather boots should work, but the splintmail model does have them come up to around mid-calf.  If you want to use the same boots I have, you can find them here, in brown.  I removed the included front panel of each boot when I received them.  I’ve also been informed that these are the boots a lot of people use for their Jedi costumes, so if you’re making a Jedi costume at the same time as you’re making your splintmail, you can knock out two birds with one stone here.  Furthermore, I use these boots for not only my splintmail Alistair costume, but my Grey Warden Alistair costume and my costume for Alistair’s Tevinter Ballroom outfit from the Dragon Age comics.

I’ve also added gel inserts into my boots, given the sheer amount of time I’m standing or walking in costume.  Do yourself a favor and pick some up.  They’re worth every penny.

As for the boot wraps, the way they’re shaped to my leg keeps them fairly secured in place, especially with the belt the model uses over that part.  To add another layer of keeping it in place as I walk, I attached a Velcro loop to the inside of the foam wrap, which loops over one of the convenient bands on the outside of the boot.  Do note that this only applies to the boots I linked above, and other boots are unlikely to have these bands.

Bracers and Gauntlets

Like the boots and chaps, my base gauntlets were recycled from splintmail 1.0, with the addition of a metal panel on the top of each hand, made from Sintra like all of the other crafted metal bits on this costume.  The gauntlets I used can be found here. However, do note that these are black, with all of the fingers still at full length, whereas the splintmail’s gauntlets are the same shade of brown as the rest of the leather bits on the costume, and have the fingertips snipped off of them.  To change the color of the leather, I watered down some dark brown paint, and applied about a dozen or so layers of the stuff, allowing them to dry inbetween(I believe I wore the gauntlet while painting, and simply hit it with a hair dryer between each layer to speed up the process),  until you have the correct shade.  That said, I’ve since discovered Angelus brand leather paints, which is likely to be a much better way to go about this than my original method.  If anyone tries these and has some success, please hit me with a message to let me know!

The bracers were pretty straightforward.  The process for turning the foam into leather is the same, with the only addition of cutting four rectangles into the parallel grooves to feed two leather belts through.  Simply tighten them onto your wrist.  I actually love how simple this design is, and it requires no adhesives to hold the straps on. Good job, designers!

Wrist Pouch

On the flip side of design commentary, the splintmail(as well as a lot of other armor sets in this game) lack any integrated pouches, pockets, or bags.  Being a stickler for screen accuracy, I didn’t want to buy a leather pouch and just slap it on the costume where ever, so I had to get a little creative to keep my wallet, phone, and badge on my person, as I hate having to be dependent on a handler, and one that I can hide behind my shield, since my forearm is obscured by a heater shield on this costume.  If you’ve read the writeup on my first suit of splintmail, you’ll be familiar with this little pouch, but it’s honestly been such a wonderful addition to not only store my personal items, but keep them handy at a moment’s notice(for grabbing my phone for a photo or to take a call, for instance), and I can’t recommend it enough.

While I don’t have any templates for this thing, it’s honestly just a box that has some brown vinyl glued over it to form a pouch with adjustable tension straps that hang out the back to secure it to my forearm.  Yes, you could absolutely use real leather if you wanted, or you could even buy and modify a leather pouch from somewhere like Dark Knight Armoury or the like.  I superglued some small, rare earth magnets to the pouch flap and the pouch itself so I can operate the bag easily with one hand, without fiddling with belt loops or buckles.  I manage to fit my wallet, convention badge, cellphone, a bottle of superglue(I keep it in a plastic bag just in case it leaks), and some chewing gum, chapstick, and my GoPro(which I use to film bits of the conventions I attend) in it.  It’s a simple costume element that will make your life a lot easier.

Warden Longsword

For the sword Alistair starts with in Dragon Age: Origins, I modified a polypropylene hand-and-a-half sword from Cold Steel.  While it looks pretty close, there are a few differences between this and the in-game model(other than the obvious blade thickness): the crossguard, the grip, and the pommel.   You could certainly keep your sword as-is, with some added coloring.

To get the pommel more screen accurate, I opted to purchase the one-handed training sword Cold Steel offers, as it has a disc pommel.  Alternatively, if want to save some cash, you could purchase their training dagger, as it has the same pommel as the one-hander.  The leftover sword was perfect for making the one Alistair uses with his Grey Warden armor in Dragon Age: Inquisition, so it was win-win for me. I cut both pommels off with a cutting wheel on my rotary tool, drilling a hole into the base of each, and a corresponding hole on either grip, before fitting a wooden dowel into each piece just for added stability.  I used an epoxy for this.  In addition to the disc shape, the Warden Longsword features a gear with a hemisphere in the center on either side.  I cut the gear shapes out of Sintra, cut a hole for some fake gems that I sanded the facets off of(though you could probably use some of the larger half-beads), and epoxied everything together with spring clamps. When that fully cured, I grabbed the cutting disc and rotary tool, and cut a V into the bottom of the pommel, sanding this smooth.

The crossguard or quillon block on the training sword is comically blocky, and the one in the game is far more tapered(if the crossguard shape on the training sword were metal, it would be needlessly heavy, and would restrict some of your movement).  To remedy this, I sketched the crossguard profile onto the plastic quillon block(it’s removable), and ground it down with my rotary tool and some sandpaper.  This alone won’t achieve a smooth surface, so I turned to Bondo, an automotive body filler.  Bill Doran from Punished Props has a great video on how to work with the stuff, but if you do decide to go with Bondo, I cannot stress enough the absolute need for a respirator.  Not only does the stuff release some toxic-smelling fumes as it cures, but the particulate that’s kicked up from sanding Bondo is really harmful to your lungs.  Protect yourself, folks.  Shape that quillon block to a fine smoothness.

The Warden longsword’s grip is relatively nondescript.  It’s ovate(historically accurate, as completely circular grips make using the sword and aligning the edge properly incredibly difficult), and has two shallow ridges running down the center of either face.  This was pretty straightforward.  I used my rotary tool to grind down a central groove, and then rounded the outside edges until the ridges became more and more prominent. After that, I simply smoothed the grip out with some Bondo and plenty of sanding to get it looking like the in-game model.

Prior to painting, I epoxied the pommel to the grip, sanding the juncture smooth, and then primed the pieces with a medium gray primer.  To color everything, I used a carnauba wax compound impregnated with metallic powder called Rub ‘N Buff.  As the name suggests, friction from rubbing the material onto a surface and then buffing it will melt the wax, causing the metal to shine and distribute evenly.  I used Silver Leaf on the blade and Antique Gold on the crossguard and pommel, applying it with an old t-shirt that’s not usable as anything but a Rub ‘N Buff cloth now.  The grip was colored with a medium gray acrylic paint, and I applied a faint amount of silver Rub ‘N Buff on the high points.

While you could seal everything in with a standard clear coat, normal cans of clear finish have a reputation for dulling metallic finishes.  What I eventually found to work best has been an airbrush-applied gloss coat made for highly metallic lacquers, though you could leave it uncoated and just reapply the Rub ‘N Buff after every outing or so.  Thankfully with the aging and weathering on this costume, a rough/dull metallic finish won’t look out of place.  Pretty nice compared to the ol’ NERF one, eh?

Templar Shield

The shield is the only armor element I can’t lay claim to making or modifying.  I managed to commission Bill Doran from Punished Props when he was still taking commissions, and he did a fantastic job with it.  Alternatively, I did make one out of cardboard for a giveaway I did on Tumblr a while ago, and while I never got around to editing the ridiculous amount of video footage of the build, I did take some photos of the progress.

To start, I cut the overall shape out of cardboard(18”x25” for mine), then traced and cut several more layers until it reached the overall height I wanted for the finished product, making sure to mark the vertical and horizontal lines to determine the quadrants on each piece. Next, I cut out two pieces of cardboard—one the same length as the shield, and the other the same width—both the height of the shield.  Then I cut the contour of the overall curve of the face of the shield into those pieces and cut a small rectangle into either piece to interlock them into a cross shape.  This is the core of the shield that you’ll glue your sections against.  Once you’ve separated your quadrants into stacks, you want to start narrowing your layers as they ascend upwards.  This will add structure to the shield’s domed surface.

Once my strata were shaped properly, I set them aside, and grabbed my base piece of cardboard to figure out my straps.  Tracing my forearm and hand onto it to determine where I’d be gripping it, I cut up a belt, cut some narrow rectangles to thread the belts through.  I opted to cut some extra spacers out of cardboard to alleviate some of the stress the straps would impart on those holes, and hot glued them down.  When I figured out the length needed to thread my arm through(taking into account the extra space needed for the bracer), I hot glued those down as well. Next up, the cross section, cutting just enough space out around the belts to keep the rest of the horizontal crosspiece flush against the base plate.  Follow this same method for the ascending layers, hot gluing them into place against the central cross and the piece below each as you go.

The domed piece will require a little bit of finesse to get the curve into it, since it naturally wants to lay flat.  I basically glued the central corner into place, and then gently curved the rest of the piece over the top of the layered pieces, gluing it down when I was happy with the curve.  From here, I started measuring out the overlaid frame pieces out of more cardboard, and gluing them into place.  

With the structure laid out, I used the cutting wheel on my rotary tool to carve in some fake wood grain onto the surface, and the wood slat panel lines onto the front and back piece. Painting a natural looking wood texture might be a little tricky at first, but similar to the faux leather paintjob, layering is key.  Start with a dark brown acrylic paint, and while the paint is partially dried but still tacky, drag the brush through it again to create some more wood-grain-like textures.  Using a lighter brown and a tan color, dry brush lighter shades over pieces of the dark brown paint until it looks like wood grain.  Seal all of this paint in with a matte clear coat finish.

Using the reference images to determine the placement of the random leather straps tacked onto the surface(not the leather hide with the heraldry on top just yet), I cut out some strips of vinyl, and to weather them a bit, took some fine grit sandpaper lightly to the surface to take down the fake looking shine of the vinyl I used.  Next, I took some finishing nails with a wide head to them, and tacked down the strips straight into the cardboard.  In retrospect, using hot glue to glue the strips into place first, using the nails only as a visual aspect may have been best.

Finally, for the hide on the surface, I used a section of that same vinyl, and cut an organic shape out, trying my best to stick to the shape of the same part of the reference image. Just like the vinyl strips, I scuffed up the surface to weather the leather a bit.  To add further weathering, I mixed up some flesh tones, and added scuffing around some of the edges.

The larger nails were plastic nail-like pieces I found at the hardware store while looking for furniture tacks.  They were initially completely smooth on the surface, so to emulate a hammered metal texture, I took a tapered grinding bit on my rotary tool, and carefully and lightly ground in that texture, lightly hitting the surface with some silver Rub ‘N Buff to give it the metallic color.

The heraldry was achieved by measuring out the basic outlines of the shield shape on the hide and cutting out a flame piece to use as a traceable template.  The cracked texture took me some experimentation, but I found that by mixing acrylic paint with white school glue, I could paint the mixture on, and when I used a hair dryer on it, the paint would dry first, causing the cracking as the glue set.

I painted the burnt umber looking top section of the heraldry on after the fact, and then traced on the flames into the white area, filling that in with a yellowy-tan. When that was all dry, I carefully outlined each flame as well as the shield emblem in a brown acrylic, as per the reference image.  To weather the shield, I thinned out some black acrylic, and lightly emulated some wrinkles on the hide and some shadows around the nails.  Now go make a shield.  It’s super fun!

And with that, your splintmail should be finished!

Yeah, it’s a pretty big investment, and it might set you back a good chunk of money to do it the way I did it, but it’s absolutely a huge step above cardboard, and doesn’t cost as much as, nor does it require the same tools and machinery necessary, to make it out of leather and steel, as awesome as that would be.

Honestly, if this was helpful to you and you wound up building your own splintmail using this walkthrough, let me know!  I love Alistair as a character, and want to make my build as transparent and helpful as possible so there can be more Alistair cosplaying going on.  If there’s anything in the walkthrough that’s unclear, or if you need a second opinion on your build, please don’t be afraid to send me a message!  I’d be more than happy to help out if I can!

Now get out there and make some armor!