January 2014 UFO Sightings in the Workshop

The holidays really took their toll on workshop projects, so it's taken me a couple of weeks of 2015 to really gather steam and get to working on my various projects again.

Back in what seems like forever ago, my amazingly gorgeous girlfriend bought a couple of tickets for us to go to Star Wars Celebration 7 in Anaheim with the condition that I had to come up with stuff for us to wear.  Once some of my friends got word of the fact that we were going, they started making plans to go along, so I'm dressing many of them as well.  One or two of them have even showed up in the workshop to help me build the outfits for them.  

So looking around the workshop there's a lot of Star Wars stuff going on.  Here's my friend Matt putting together a jetpack prototype so we can dress as a unit of Mandalorian Death Watch Mercenaries from the Clone Wars series:


In order to include our significant others in this plan, we're also making a handful of sets of Nite Owl armor.  Here's some of the helmets in progress:


Another thing I'm planning on making a few of are the Sith Warriors seen in the trailers for the Old Republic MMORPG (like this one).  Here's the first couple fo pieces of the armor out of the molds:


I'm laying them up in fiberglass, so they'll be unnecessarily sturdy, but using silicone molds to ensure that they'll have all of the details in place.  Here I am test-fitting the chest armor:


Also from the Old Republic there's the Shae Vizla costume I'm building in cooperation with DW Design Studios for Shawnon.  If you don't know who Shae Vizla is, she's the redheaded badass that shows up prominently in this video.  Here's the prototype for one of the gauntlets in progress:

Still not sure if I want to make the flamethrowers functional or not...

For one of the other Star Wars costumes I'm making, I had to lifecast a copy of Shawnon's head.  Here's a shot of me cleaning up the seam line in the lifecast so you can see what she's look like if she shaved her head and painted herself orange:


Getting away from Star Wars for a moment, I'm also doing some work on another set of Warhammer 40K armor:

This one will be epic.

And finally, since I can't seem to get enough Ironman, I've been tinkering with a prototype for the War Machine helmet from Ironman 2:

It's still got a ways to go, but I'm loving the way this guy is coming out.

Stay tuned for more detailed write-ups of these and many more of my projects...