DIY Knight Shield Costume- EVA Foam Armor Template-Pattern

Hi my name is Chris and I've got some foam floor mats which aren't that great for juggling. They are however great for making a sweet shield to go with your foam knight armor costume. Hey everyone today I'm going to show you how to make a shield to go along with your knight armor costume. I'll be adding this template to the knight armor pattern so if you've already bought it check your emails and there should be an update for you. I think I'll include a couple different sizes though this is the biggest you can get if you want to make it out of a puzzle piece floor mat. If you want to go bigger you're going to need to find some bigger sheets of foam or maybe glue a couple puzzle piece floor mats together or puzzle piece them together. All right let's make a shield. All right so as usual start by printing out your pattern, walking to your patio doors, removing any window accoutrements, lining up the alignment marks and taping the pattern together. Oh yeah and don't forget to make sure it's printed at actual size otherwise you might end up with a tiny little shield. Also if you really don't like taping you can just do half of the pattern and then flip it when you trace it onto the foam, up to you. Cut the shield pattern out with some scissors and lay it out on your foam mat. The foam I'm using here is about nine millimeters thick and 22-ish inches wide, not counting for the puzzle piece sticky outy bits. Trace the pattern onto your foam and grab a super sharp knife. Cut the foam with your knife. Now you can trace foam shield number one onto puzzle piece sheet two. Make a few marks through the pattern so you can draw on your hand grip guidelines. Where you want the hand grips to actually be is going to be a big personal preference but those lines can at least get you in the right ballpark. I personally like my arm to go through one of the grips and then grab the other one with my hand which means one of the grips is going to need to be much bigger than the other. Now because we're making these marks on what will become the inside of the shield make sure you use your opposite arm to do the figuring because everything's going to be flipped. Find a belt to use for the hand grips and mark its width. Now this step isn't necessary but I did it to see if it would help the foam stop ripping beside the hand grip slots. I just punched a five millimeter hole at the end of each slot before I cut them. Just be sure you don't get distracted by pretending your foam mat can talk. Extend the strap lines out about six centimeters or so and then cut a whole bunch of lines side by side inside that rectangular area. You want to make sure those lines only cut about a third of the way through your foam mat. Now start from the center and work your way out to the edges with your knife lying down as flat as possible and cut all those strips out. What we're doing here is trying to make a bit of an indentation where we're going to be gluing the ends of the belts. Otherwise you'll see some lumps on the front of your shield when you glue it together if you don't. If you're using really thin straps like just some webbing you wouldn't need to do this. Nice little cut out. Now you can cut out the foam back sheet. Cut about five to ten millimeters outside the line that you traced from the front piece. Thread the belt through one of the slots in the shield on the side that you want your arm to go through. The great thing about using the buckle is now you can make it adjustable. Remember if you're going to be wearing the foam armor with this test it with the arm piece to make sure you've got a long enough strip of belt. Once you're sure cut it off then you can thread the end of the belt with all the holes in it through the other side and you've got an adjustable arm slot thing. Now the hand grip is just one piece that fits your hand. I used water-based contact cement to glue the straps into their depressions. I'm not a hundred percent sure if that was the right glue to use but it worked pretty good. Once the contact cement is tacky to the touch you can firmly press the belt ends into their new little homes. Okay now one of the things that gives this shield a bit of rigidity is the fact that it has a slight curve to it. It'll make the gluing easier later if we add some of that curve now. So heat it up, curve it a bit, and hold it till it cools down. Do this to both of the shield pieces making sure you're curving them in the proper direction of course. Give a light sanding to the two sides that are going to be glued and test to make sure everything's going to fit together properly once you get the glue on. I had a lot of trouble with the contact cement this time and I never really have before. I think it may partly be because I decided to spread it out with a piece of foam which basically would have scraped most of the contact cement off the upper surfaces leaving it gathered in the deeper texture parts. So the raised surfaces would be too dry and no longer contact cementy before the lower surfaces were dry enough to be contact cementy. Anyways let's keep going and pretend it's going to work properly. Cut out some strips of cardboard while you wait for your contact cement to dry. Find something you can put down the center line of the shield that will support it while still allowing it to stay curved. Place some protective cardboard down on either side of the center line to keep things from sticking too soon. Line up the outside of the shield with where it's supposed to go. Press firmly down the center line to lock it in place. Remove the cardboard and then firmly press the two halves together. Making sure to maintain that nice curve. Now grab a 5 gallon bucket, lay it on its side, all the while making sure no children fall into it. Now by draping a cutting mat over the bucket we have a nice curved cutting board which is perfect for cutting the extra off the back of our shield. Just use the front of the shield as a guide and cut off anything that sticks out past it. Next cut some strips of 2mm thick foam that are 3cm wide, which is handy because that's the width of my ruler. Apply contact cement to the strips and to the front of the shield all the way around the edge. Once the contact cement has dried you can start carefully putting those strips around the outside edge. The strips are pretty easy to glue down when they're going fairly straight but can get a little trickier when they have to go around a curve. What seems to work best is to just glue down the outside edge of the strip as it goes around the corner. That'll leave the inside edge of the strip a bit wrinkly and sticking out. Then after you've got the rest of the strips stuck down you can go back to that curve, heat it up a bit with a heat gun to soften it, and then gently press it down evening out all the wrinkles as you do. The other tricky bit is cutting the angles where two strips meet. I like to get a piece of cardboard in there right along the angle before it's glued down. That way the rest of the strip isn't gluing itself down where it's not supposed to be. Cut along the angle and remove the extra bit of strip. Then you can overlap the next strip over top of that one and cut its angle to match. If you happen to cut the top piece a little too long that's okay. Just keep cutting through the strip below it, remove the extra little piece of foam from the underneath strip, and that'll give you a perfect fit. Just make sure you pay attention to where you set down the strips you haven't used yet because if they touch each other they're not going to let go. Okay so remember how I said about the contact cement not working right for me? Well I first noticed something was wrong when I flexed the shield and I heard sort of a breathing sound. That's air getting sucked inside because the two halves aren't actually glued together in the center, which meant I got the fun job of pulling them back apart, which this should really not be possible if the glue is sticking properly, which it obviously wasn't. Anyways I was able to open it up, reapply the contact cement, and close it back up again without it looking too awkward. Make some marks where you want to add fake rivets for a bit of extra interest, trying to space them relatively evenly along the outside of the shield. On the two longer sides I think I spaced them about 9.6 centimeters apart. Grab a 10mm hole punch and punch a bunch of discs from some 2mm foam. Use some super glue to glue them on top of the spots they're supposed to go. And there you go, a shield that needs to be painted black. Okay if you've seen pretty much any of my videos you'll know my painting technique by now. I like to start off by giving three good coats of black paint, of course allowing it to fully dry between coats. Then I grab my secret silver mix, which is made from equal parts silver and pewter deco art Americana Decor Metallics paints. Put a little paint on a piece of cardboard, put on a glove, rub a finger in the paint, then rub most of the paint off of your finger, and then lightly rub the paint that's left over on your finger onto the shield. Do this over and over and over and over again until you're really tired of doing it. And then do some more. Until your shield looks amazing and silvery. Now that you have your shield all that's left is to put a fierce creature on the front to scare away your enemies. You can use the same inkjet printer transfer technique I used in the knight armor video, or if you happen to have just gotten a new laser cutter you can use that. Paint it black, paint it vintage brass, and then add some extra sheen with some 24 karat gold. Now here's something I don't think I've ever talked about. It's a bucket of stuff I found in my basement when we moved into this house, and it's basically like a removable adhesive. So if I paint the back of my flying narwhal with it and let it dry, then when I press it onto my shield, it'll stay. But if I ever want to change what's on my shield, I can peel it off and replace it with something else. That's pretty handy. And with that, we're done. Just for reference, this is how the shield compares to the child size small armor. Alright so we made a shield. Pretty great. A couple thoughts about making the shield is the thicker foam that you can use the better. I have the original shield I made for my son way back, and it's probably made from 12mm foam, and it's really really quite tough. Quite a bit stiffer than this one. This is still fine, but definitely the thicker and denser foam you can get, the better shield it's going to make. I also had lots of trouble with the contact cement this time. I don't know, I've never had that much trouble before, so I don't know if it was just sort of a bad batch of contact cement, or just terrible technique, but it still isn't perfect in the back there, it's still wanting to pull away a little bit, so I might just like make a few holes and shoot in some super glue or something to stick it down very well. You could also use non-water based contact cement, which works way better, however make sure you do it outside where it's ventilated and wear a respirator, because it's way worse to breathe. And of course this size, which is the biggest you can get out of a foam floor mat, is a little small for any adult costume. It's good for sort of the medium kids and the large kids. For the small kids I would probably go just a little bit smaller so when they're carrying around it's not getting in the way. It's easy to cut out the pattern and just see what size looks good for you. And that's it! Super straightforward. I'll include a link to the night pattern, which will now include the shield as well, and have a great day! Thanks for watching! See ya!