• Tutorial: Making Rose Quartz's Sword


    Looking to cosplay Rose Quartz, or even Connie, and need to know how to make an awesome sword? pkloveboing has just the tutorial for you!



    MAKING ROSE QUARTZ’S SWORD
    Pic 1 - I used the foam mats pictured. They are from Harbor Freight, it’s known as EVA foam, and is about 1/2″ thick. I cut out a cardboard version of the sword first,like a rough draft. To make the sword as long as possible out of one piece of foam, I had to cut it out diagonally. This is the cardboard version I used with the finished piece!

    Pic 2 - Cut out TWO slices of foam, one for each side. You can use high-power scissors or exacto/drywall blades.

    Pic 3 - Close up of the detail near the base of the blade. The sword has those petal-looking parts. I used my Dremel lightly to make these indentations.

    Pic 4 - Carving out a channel for the wooden dowel to go through. It forms a handle and keeps the blade stiff. Again, I used the Dremel for this, though there may be a few other methods to make this possible.

    Pic 5 - The dowel/core of the sword sandwiched between the two sides. The whole thing is hot glued together. The dowel is somewhere between 1/2″ and 5/8″ so I had to carve a little more than halfway through the foam! Now, I KNOW this is not an ideal core for a foam sword, and if it breaks, there is pretty much no fixing it at all. So this is unfortunately not a LARP-ready sword. There ARE different cores made for LARP foam swords that are flexible and won’t break easy, this is just what I used. I think other ones are made out of fiberglass or something. If you want that, do the extra research and find where to get them. I just need to be gentle with it.

    Pic 6 - This is the guard. I used a dog food bowl to get the circle right. I pretty much guessed for the length of the guard. I used my Dremel to bore out holes to stick it through the dowel.

    Pic 7 - Here I have the guard put on. For the actual handle part, I used a strip of super-thin craft foam, wrapped around several times. It adds to the thickness of the handle and is pretty comfortable and squishy.

    Pic 8 - The rose-shaped pommel of the sword. This is four little pieces of foam glued together and Dremeled into a roughly rose-shaped piece. It’s a bit rough but I’m happy with it.

    Pic 9 - This is the best picture I could find that shows the edge of the blade, also smoothed down with the Dremel. This is one time you could easily use  sandpaper in its place. It’s a little rough, because this is one of the first things I tried the Dremel on.

    Pic 10 - Before painting, I first used Plastidip on the foam to seal it and keep me from needing a million coats of paint. Bare foam tends to soak up some paints. I’ve mentioned this stuff in my other tutorial posts, and they have pictures of a can of Plastidip in them. I’m out of space for pictures on this post. Use a minimum of two coats, three or more and you’re gold. 


    The first two colors are the ones used for the two-tone blade. They are ‘light pink’ and ‘baby pink.’ I picked these up at Michael’s.


    It took about three coats but I didn’t run out of paint. This is all hand-painted by the way! The colors all have a matte finish, and honestly, for this sword, I think it looks perfect. The colors are bold and unweathered, giving the sword a cartoony, unworldly look.


    The second two colors are ‘dioxazine purple’ and ‘carousel pink.’ That pink was used for the guard, pommel, and parts of the base of the blade.


    These four colors are all that I used for this, though there was some color blending for several parts- the dark, petal-y part of the blade base, the handle, and the underside of the guard. The purple was also acting a bit weird and kept wanting to soak into the foam. I’d look for a different purple than this one if I were you. All the other colors are fantastic-looking and spot-on to me, I recommend those ones.
    Source


    Twitter: Emerald