Body Construction

This costume was a radical departure from my previous designs; in this case, I decided to use an all-foam construction for the body. This was because the stone texture I planned to use for the surface coloration worked best on foam. (I did extensive surface tests to find the best way to get a carved stone appearance; when working with new substances, I recommend a period of experimentation before actually starting the costume to test them on the materials you plan to use.)

The first challenge was to design the body. After a lot of sketching in my fursuit notebook, I developed a workable design. The main trunk of the body would be one piece, with the arms and lower legs being separate. The fact that the costume was a number of separate components would be hid by overlapping pointed protusions, a sort of carapace design. To enhance this, additional points were added coming off the shoulders, the tips of the wings, the heels, and other places.

The entire shell of the costume (body, arms, and legs) was built out of one inch thick foam sheets. This is the common polyurethane foam rubber that's used in cushions. The pieces were all glued edge-to-edge, using Fastbond 100 adhesive. Since I don't have a spray gun applicator, the glue was applied using small foam wedge brushes, like the one shown at left. This works well enough for the Fastbond. The joins in the foam, once dry, were quite resilient. I built the body around a duct tape dummy of myself. This allowed me to build the costume without being inside of it!

For certain areas where flexibility was most important, I created gussets from a black fleece fabric. This same fabric was used for the sleeves on the forearms. These gussets compensated for the fact that the foam was not able to create perfect joints; flexing the joints would've caused the foam pieces to separate, revealing glimpses of the interior of the costume. (In the pictures with unpainted foam, it's easy to spot which parts of the costume were fabric and which were foam by their contrasting colors.)

The feet were sculpted on top of sandals, one of my typical techniques. Here, a shell of foam was simply wrapped around the shoes and then joined onto a (roughly) cylindrical leg piece. The toes were then attached to the front of the feet.

Black fabric is used to hide the transition to the legs. This tucks inside the upper leg portions attached to the torso. A line of elastic, visible in the photo, holds the fabric sleeve in place.

I knew from the beginning that I'd want my gargoyle to have wings. Practical considerations limited the size of the wings; from experiences with other costumes, I decided that my wings should not be so large that they would cause problems with doorways and such. After some sketches to determine the scale for the wings, I had to deal with the structural problems. Since the construction was foam, they would not be strong enough to support their own weight; I would need to add internal structure to keep them in their upright posture.

Since I didn't want the wings to move much, just bounce a little as I moved, the problem was fairly straightforward. When constructing the main spar of the wing (from my shoulders to the upper tip of the wing), I sandwiched a hollow rigid fiberglass tube inside the foam. A matching hollow tube for each wing was built into a harness to be worn under the costume. A bent metal rod would slip into both tubes, to provide support for the weight and hold the wings at a fixed angle.

The harness, seen at left, for the wings was scratch-built from nylon webbing. I purchase my webbing from the local REI store's climbing equipment section. (You can even order their webbing online!). This material is easy to work with and can support huge amounts of weight without stretching, tearing, or breaking. This harness only took me about two hours to sew, start to finish, including adding some padding for the shoulders (1/4" foam rubber sewn inside a wrap of nylon fabric).

That more or less completed the body construction. Of course, what can't be described is the hours upon hours of finishing work that went into it. The picture of the body and head test fitting above shows what it looked like after assembly and detailing but before the stone paint finish.

The surface detailing was done with sharp (at first) scissors. Cutting was done by pressing the scissors into the foam from the side, not using the tips to poke the foam. Although a tedious method, it produces excellent results. The texture was very reminiscent of a rough-carved stone gargoyle. This finishing technique was used over every exposed foam surface of the costume.