Monday, June 6, 2011

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Just Like Clockwork: Part 3

This post is a couple days late, but I've been rather busy the past little bit, so here's the finale to my goggle building escapade.

So close to completion...
I glued in all the vinyl to the eyepiece, and put a bit of vinyl on the buckle. I used a basic lapel pin to keep all the vinyl in place. I've poked a hole in the eyesockets to fit the pin in so that the headband can be both flexible and removable from the eyepieces. :D








I'm just being a nerd. NBD.
Done! Everything is glued and pinned in! I've clipped off the tabs of the lenses so now they look like they're a part of the goggles.
It's like that airship is really headed straight for me!











I can mix and match the colours I want for each lens too!












Thus ends my adventure of goggle-making! The next part of this whole ordeal is to get an actual outfit together. I'm still thinking of going for a sort of mechanic look, so I'll need to get a hold of a bunch of pouches and tools for a utility belt of sorts. I'll keep you posted with how it goes!

That's all for now, folks.

Keep being Awesome.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Just Like Clockwork: Part 2

Today's main goal for goggle-making was to paint the eyepieces and start the assembly. Since most of the day was spent waiting for paint to dry, I couldn't start assembling the goggles today. Once I pick up a few more supplies and bits tomorrow, I'll be able to put it all together and then add the finishing touches.

So, for today's shenanigans:

As black as the grim and frostbitten North.
I spray painted the eyepieces a matte black. The entire process took about half a day, because I wanted the paint to be as dry as possible before I worked with it again. You can also see the buckles I am using. The eyepieces will hopefully match them in bronziness.







Drybrushing = <3

I drybrushed the eyepieces with the same paints as the buckles. This isn't the final colour, I added one more layer of gold on top of this.












How you doin'?
Here is all the vinyl that I cut out yesterday, neatly arranged into a somewhat creepy face.


Good...
Now that the eyepieces aren't a ridiculous blue, I'm retrying all the different colour lenses, and green still seems to work nicely, however...
... Better.









I put in the blue and clear lenses, and I think they look much cooler than the green ones. I think it's the contrast between the browns, golds and the blue that make them look so nice. You can also see that I've wrapped a bit of vinyl around the nosepiece. It was simply glued on with Krazy Glue.



That's all that happened today as far as goggles go, hopefully tomorrow I can start putting them together, and they'll be finished by the end of Friday.

That's all for now, folks.

Keep being Awesome.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Just Like Clockwork: Part 1

DIY Design update. I've decided to swap around the order that I'm making my projects this summer so that I make my steampunk goggles first. Why? FanExpo, that's why! After seeing all the awesomeness that I missed at Anime North and remembering the great weekend of Con-G, I'm getting extremely pumped for this summer's FanExpo.

I've decided to get together a steampunk costume for the occasion. For those of you who remember, I went a little steampunk for South Formal, dressing all gentlemanly-like. I'm thinking of going in the opposite direction, and making a sort of mechanic/ engineer/ greasemonkey outfit. I'm going to be making a new set of goggles for this. Goggles that won't fall apart if they aren't sitting on a hat. Goggles that actually fit on my face. Goggles that I can actually see out of. Exciting, no?

I started the project today, so here's what I've got going on so far.

I can see the final product already. :D
I remember catching a glimpse of these "Colour Mixing Glasses" during one of my shifts at work. For $7, they'll do nicely as the base of the eyepieces.










Perfect fit.
I cut out paper templates to fit in the eyesockets. To get the right length, measure the diameter of the eyepiece, multiply by Pi, and add about half of an inch. Mine happened to come out to 20.3cm (8").









Time for some fucking Cosine graphs. Awww yeah.
For the shape, measure about 3cm (1.18") out from the midpoint. draw out a sinusoidal curve connecting the middle to both ends, and cut out.
The "Colour Mixing Glasses" came with 4 types of lenses. Blue, yellow, red, and clear. Since you can fit two lenses in each eyesocket at a time, I also tried out green, orange and purple, and green seemed to be the nicest looking. I just need to shave of those damn tabs at the top of the lenses...



 
As much as I would love walking around at FanEpo with bright blue goggles, I'm going to spray paint them black then drybrush them to look like beaten copper, just like my first pair of goggles. Now, onto the fabricwork!


A leather belt to be used as the headband, and a buttload of vinyl for everything else that needs to look like leather. I might end up using vinyl for the headband since its thin, light and a bit stretchy.



I also have buckles (which are now drybrushed copper) and lots of vinyl cut out. Unfortunately it's late and I'm too lazy to whip out my camera, so I'll be posting up pictures of all that shizz tomorrow along with tomorrow's progress.

Tomorrow, I continue with steampunking and listening to my Woods of Ypres heavy playlist.

What, you don't listen to Black Metal during Arts & Crafts time?
That's all for now, folks.

Keep being Awesome.