Madog's leather tutorial Making the patterns

This is a part of the tutorial Madog's leather tutorial

Section 2 Making the patters

Tools that you will need

To perform this part of the tutorial your going to need some tools.

1 - Sharpe[tm] - writing utensil
1 - Friskar Scissors (Mr. Friskar)
1 - Husky Knife (Husky)
1 roll - Ducktape
Tape Measure - at least 3'
Lots of: Card board , Foam Stock, or Poster board

Many of these tools you will use in other steps. I will stress the need for a set of Mr. Friskar's or two (one to cut tape and one not to cut tape). The Duck tape is generaly the thicker the better. And your going to need lots of cardboard. Generaly stores through it away by the dumpster full, so don't E-mail me about where to get cardboard cheap.

Optional:

Heavy Metal
Knife / Scissor sharpener

The Knife Sharpener is, of course, to keep Mr. Friskar and Husky nice and sharp (yes you can sharpen a razor blade on a Husky).

If your like me your going to need some good music(yeah I know these were the closest cases to the picture). Durring this project I listened to: GWAR - We Kill Everything, Presidents of the United States of America, and Megadeath, Symphony of Destruction. I highly recomend if your making armor alone to have music, or a movie. Perferably heavy metal music or something invigorating. It seems to encourage hard core evil armor juices to really come to the surface.

Building your piece

Note I am going to sort of start out in the middle here and describe a piece.

We are going to build the bottom "rib" of the modified Uruk-hai suit here.

This is an image of a suit of Uruk-hai Ravager armor. We are going to make the very bottom lame or 'rib' of the suit in the speacialized or Modified suit in this tutoral.

In this image you can see I have already made many of the patterns out of cardboard and we are going to continue making the lower lame that is missings pattern.

Dimensions are often difficult. The Ravager armor shown above has lames front and back that are 27" x 5" and they are about 4" to large for me. So I am making this suit smaller at 25"x 5" with the cool fang like spiky protusions I am actualy making them 8" x 25"

Getting the Cardboard

Step 1. aquire a box. This one helped me move into my new apartment before that it was what my home theatre sterio called home while at the shelves of Sams Club. Anyways it will meet its fate tonight.

Step 2. Arm yourself witht the Husky!

-Picture ommitted* - it was just so brutal and fast.

Step 3. Cut the tape holding the box up and break it down to one flat piece, this may require cutting an edge of the box but 99.9% of all the boxes I have ever seen have had at least one edge that is glued, brute force can tear that apart, unless your an elf then get an ork or barbarian buddy to help you out, if all else fails Mr. Friskar was made to cut through this stuff.

Step 4. - Lay the victum out and find an area large enough for you next piece... in our case 8" x 25".

Step 5. - Draw an 8" x 25" box on the cardboard in a logical spot. A logical spot is a place that saves the most cardboard for other patters. But cardboard is cheap and free so don't fret if you screw this up and go diagonal along the piece. Unfortunatly 90* might look like a logic alternative, but it was 23" long. I am not worried about theat hole there since I know how to fix that later in the proccess.

And there you have it... ready to start some serious designing now? Since this is a patter this is a great time to plan those funny details that make your armor just about you. In this case evil spikes, finnishing a bulkhead, and planning battle damage.

Plan out the shape & details

Step 6. Our piece is going to fit in a 8x25" box but the base or original piece was 5x25" so lets make a 5 inch mark and draw a line there.

Step 7. Ok now since this piece is symetrical, that is the same on both sides for the under 100 IQ out there, we are going to add a center line as well. Note how very uncareful I am about these lines, I sometime eyeball these lines, sometimes I measure, it is up to you. Since they are just guides they are, fudgable. BTW eyeballed lines are faster.

Step 8. Details. I am going to start by Eyeballing the bulkhead off the bulkhead from the other pieces above it so it all lines up. Note: the middle lame / rib is above this piece as I work.

Step 9. More details, I am adding in the cool spikes that go down in the base and sort of drawing a guidline for the edging in the finnished piece. Right now I am thinking about making everything below the edging white.

Add some Fun details

Step 10. Here we go. Some fun details. Little back story at age 7 I had my appendix removed. Yep I am going to draw in a little battle wound here... one herniated apendix rupture! Art school and "We kill everything" inspired this one.

[Image:Leather-13.jpg]]

Step 10b. And the other side... how about a little Wolverine claw like gash on the left side.

Step 11. Back to some seriouse work. This dotted line marks how far the lame above will overlap this lame. This is just a placeholder.

Lets compare now. kinda fussy but in real life it looks ok.

Step 12. Before we start cutting with Mr.. you guess Friskar. We need to resolve that handle hole. One piece of duck tape does the trick. Luckly I didn't have to cut out a piece to replace the hole... that would have sucked, and instead it had just flapped down.

== Cut out the Pattern

Step 13. Start Cutting that pattern out. Mr. Fiskars do your work. While cutting keep the edges somewhat clean since they will be used to trace leather in the next section.

Here is a finnished cut out piece.

Take a moment to observe the piece besides its adjacent patters. Not to shabby here, Wilbur I think she'll fly.

Step 14. Flip the pattern over and label it. Once you cut something out it is a good idea to label it as soon as you have it cut out, trust me if you do 3 or 4 and they are close to identical you might mix them up and create an unforseen wow-ser.

Fixing this bulkhead

Now with some foreknowledge I purposly didn't make the center "bulkhead" cut out. I decided to pattern the front as one piece and cut the bulkhead out after I got a good idea out of it. This was planned. If you look at the image above you can see that the bulkhead is actualy a separate piece cut out. I will have to cut out the "bulkhead", and expand the bulkhead.

Step 15 Call upon the power of Mr Fiskars and cut that mean evil not playing nice bulkhead out of the lower lame pattern we have created.

Observe that the overlap now takes away lateral length of the overall pattern. This is ok. You'll probably understand better when we get to the tooling tutorial on these pieces.

Now our 1 pattern has turned into 3!

Step 16 flip over the center lower lame... Label it and mark the edges. 1/2" --> this is to tell you to make the pattern 1/2 wider when you are cutting leather. Since the outer edge will never be visible you can eyeball the cut.

Adding to a pattern

Now what if we want to add something to the pattern. Well we have ducktape to save us.

Simply apply duck tape to the area you want to expand to.

Then add a piece to the other side.

These two images should explain how it is.

Step 17. Take your sharpie out and draw the new extended pattern!

Step 18. Cut out the Pattern with Mr Fiskars, he's orange but man does he make this project easy!

Observe your new finnished pattern in all it's majesty, yeah I am going to keep this for years and years, so my children can cherrish it, the ones I should be having with Ali and Ali's sister. So there is only one thing left to do...

== Shape it and make sure it is the right thing.

Step 19. CRUSH IT!. yeap when you crinkle cardboard it holds shape can be bowled slightly and can gain flexability against the corigation. We want to sort of roll thise piece.

Step 20. Copare it to the location it is suppose to go. In this case right here. Yep looks good!

Conclusion

After about 2 hours of fun and a lot of time waisted taking pictures I got all these patterns done. I have a couple more to do for tommorow. But I'll speed through them and get onto actualy cutting some leather hopefuly. I just bought GWAR's new CD "Beyond Hell" I think it is going to have to take a spin in the old CD player. Until next time, Keep rocking out to some heavy metal! - Madog