Arcane Vi Gauntlet

The first part of the making of Vi's gauntlet from arcane. This series will contain two parts: Creating the physical object and the electronics.  For this part we will be looking into the making of the gauntlet it self with mainly foam and PLA.

The fingers of the gauntlet are 3D-modeled and printed on an ender-3 and 5. Each finger took around 1.5 hours to print. The filament used for the printed parts is pla and pla+. I find them both very easy to print and overall it's a very inexpensive material. I printed with 0.24mm layer height to reduce printing time.
A pattern was created by hand drafting and adjusting the pattern to my liking. To be able to hold the gauntlet, since its supposed to be bigger than your own arm, I used a dowel with a diameter of 3 cm. Finishing it of with some googly eyes as rivets!

For the rest of the gauntlet 5 mm and 2 mm foam is used as well as foam clay for the edges. The foam from cosplayshop.be is a high density foam that is easy to cut and sand. Foam clay is an easy way to sculpt difficult shape and is extremely handy to close gabs. It is also just as easy to  sand as the usual sheets. After some sanding, cheap spray paint primer is used for the first layers to see any uneven spots. Then onto some more sanding. 

After hours of sanding to clean all the rough edges a new layer of primer is applied (use a flexible primer to prevent cracks in the paint later) continued by two layers of gold. The gold is then masked to only reveal the parts that needs to be purple. To create a porous base for the purple to stick on, another layer of primer is used on the not masked parts. White is a good base for every color but it also sets the undertone. Using white as a base for gold turns out differently than brown as a base for example.