Weathering the Leather

I remember the debut of Indiana Jones & the Raiders of the Lost Ark.  I was too young to go see it on that first round of the theaters, but I remember most that almost overnight, new-looking things became passe... especially leather coats.

There was no way I could do this without taking at least some inspiration from the illustrious Doctor Jones.

According to the extras on the Indiana Jones DVD set, the original coat for that movie was bought new and then distressed in one night sitting around the pool at a hotel on the eve of filming.  As I recall, the costumer, Deborah Nadoolman, used a Swiss Army Knife that she borrowed from Harrison Ford and a wire brush to make the jacket look like it had fallen to earth from orbit.

And the rest was cinematic history.

The good Captain may not be an archeologist/adventurer/tomb robber or whatever, but has been throwing himself out of airships with a jet pack strapped to his back for some time now and his jacket has taken a beating.

Talk about action garb.

The paint job isn't finished, but it has been completed to a point where I needed to weather and distress the jacket before continuing further.  So I took a brillo pad, a Swiss Army knife, a bottle of isopropyl alcohol and an assortment of sandpaper and went to work on the thing.

It was nerve-wracking for a little while.  Leather jackets are expensi... oh, yeah, I bought this at the thrift store.  I wonder if beating it with rocks would make it look better...

I started by putting on the jacket and marking in chalk the creases and wearpoints.
All of the seams were given a thorough dressing-down using steel wool and rubbing alcohol.

The damage to the Gears-eye should flash happened when I put the jacket on and somersaulted
down the driveway.  I love it and decided to leave it that way.

I paid special attention to places the jetpack harness would wear, up around the neck and shoulders

Some minor touch ups might be required, but only a little. 
It's a balancing act... Worn is good.  Worn out is bad.

Painting Phase II: Finishing chequered flag & left sleeve

Painting continues.  Note that weathering will follow, which explains why some of the coverage was allowed to be a bit mottled...

Gearseye :: Her Mechanical Majesty's Royal Aeronauts

Shoulder flash design...

 

 

Painting Phase One: Right Sleeve

Arbuckle Rogers -- Steampunk Flying Ace

My house getting torn apart to make it more hypo-allergenic.  At the end of this, I'll supposedly have a happier, healthier me to share with you and 80-90% less Lego Head to worry about.  Unfortunately, this has also put some of my leather-sculpting plans on hold. 

In the meantime, let us digress somewhat into the realm of science fiction for a leather working project of a wholly different sort...

One of the iconic pieces of hardware in the science fiction arsenal is the jetpack. So much so that it has become an item worthy of simultaneous homage and lampoon.  Every kid wants one, every futurist, science fiction author and movie director is simultaneously frustrated and bemused by the insistence that the future just isn't the future unless it includes rocket belts.

I'm as guilty as the next for reminiscing fondly of the days of yesteryear when commuting by jet pack was always just around the corner.  I featured them in my humor-laden paean for golden-age sci fi Howard Carter Saves the World (click to read it free online).

All of which handily ignores the that you can now buy a "jet pack" from these guys for roughly the price of a decent sports car.We'll bow to the zeitgeist and keep pretending that the future is still just out of reach.

Enter the Steampunks. Not content with reenacting actual Victorian history, we've made it something of a mission to imagine the greats of modern science fiction as if they'd been written by Jules Verne instead of George Lucas. I did this with my "Arbuckle Rogers" costume, which brings us back to jetpacks and leather working.

Since WWI comes right on the heels of the Victorian era, as you might imagine, there's quite a bit of bleed-over into steampunk. This is in part owing to the fact that Steampunk relies heavily on the conceit of the "Airship Pirate" which itself often means the application of 1920's level lighter-than-air rigid airship technologies.

And since the Victorians didn't have a fully-developed aviation tradition of their own to speak of (well, they did, but it didn't come with snappy uniforms) and in the adoption of the so-called "Punk" aspects of this, a certain raffish WWI Flying Ace demeanor has come about.  That's where the leather biggin caps and goggles come from, mostly.

And indeed, my chief dissatisfaction with the Arbuckle Rogers costume is that I didn't -- at the time at least -- have a decent leather jacket appropriate for the milieu.  But the other day, I was wandering the aisles of a thrift store when I discovered the perfect jacket to rectify that problem.

It was decent leather, a little weathered and minus the liner, so it came to only $15.00

 A lot of people do the steampunk jetpack schtick.  I plan to do it differently.  Because I said to myself: If you really had flights of jetpacked soldiery winging their way across the skies, how would you tell your guys from the other guys?  With planes it's a bit easier because since they're coming from different engineers and different factories and design traditions, etcetera, you can spot them from afar and know a Fokker from a Sopwith.

That would be a bit harder with people.  Which brings us to the painting.  Even though both the Germans and the Royal Air Force allowed their pilots a lot of latitude on decorating their kites during the early days of flight, they quickly devised a system of painting and numbering to keep track of them and to tell quickly and easily from the ground who was who.  (At least theoretically)

I posit that this would be even more necessary with flights of jetpacked humans.  So I'm devising a paint scheme for my jacket that is inspired by RAF paint schemes used at the dawn of aviation.  Why?  Because as far as I can tell, no one else has yet done so.

I have some remodeling work to do.  I apologize for the delay in the leather sculpting demo.  And I'll be back soon to discuss paints and designs.

Cheers!

Arbuckle Rogers - Venutian Ventilators (Nerf Repaints)

Short post today, sorry.  I'll make it up next week when I do the first in a series of leather demos suitable for all genres of costuming... in the meantime, hie thee to the armoury!

I didn't have the budget for one of these from the wizards at the WETA workshop (Follow that link if you've never seen the Weta raygun collection. The advertising videos alone are worth the trip!)  I  also, sadly, didn't have the time to trawl thrft stores looking for just the right lamp bits to make one of these beauties.

So, like thousands of raygun-craving steampunks before me, I picked up some spray paint and went hunting for just the right Nerf gun...

In keeping with the theme, they are a repaint of a Nerf gun that's rarely seen and probably discontinued, a single-shot Nerf Tech Target pistol which has delightful Atomic Age lines and once I hit it with a bright metallic gold spray paint and just as I did with the helmet, I treated it with a wash of burnt umber FW acrylic drawing ink to deaden the glow-in-the-dark shine of the gold, they look as if they're old brass.
It occurs to me that a proper "antiquing your props" article needs to happen.

I also made a custom wet-formed leather "gunslinger" gunbelt for these and between this and the leather masks I make (which use a very similar process) I think I'm about ready to do the wet-formed leather tutorial I've been meaning to do for quite some time now.

(Coming soon!)

Eventually, the mood might strike me and I'll make myself a scratch-built set of dueling pistols, but for now, I'm content to focus my attentions elsewhere and in the meantime, it's nice to be able to pummel my friends and enemies with foam darts.

Arbuckle Rogers - A Space Helmet (repaint/mod)

The jetpack is, of course, the iconic prop for any sci fi setting, but when I was a kid, the thing that fascinated me the most about Star Wars and the like was always the cool helmets everyone got to wear.

Put it this way: If I'd been Harrison Ford, I'd have insisted that they add a cool helmet to my wardrobe.  Sacrilege?  Maybe, but it was sincere sacrilege at least...

Since I don't have the facilities to do vacu-forming (yet) all of my helmets so far have been modifications (sometimes pretty serious ones) and repaints of existing helmets.  

NOTE: if you decided to do this, don't expect them to protect your head when you're done.  The goal is to achieve a fun, cool-looking prop, not a piece of genuine safety equipment, even if you started out with one.


I decided early-on that in order to really sell the idea of a steampunk "Buck Rogers", I needed a helmet.  


As is so often the case, I returned to the iconic "Spaceman Spiff" helmet sometimes worn by Calvin in the comic strips.  I think Bill Watterson was working from the same childhood aesthetic as I when he created that (as well as most of the props for Calvin's imaginary exploits). 

For my helmet, I hunted high and low for one with the right lines and ended up choosing a child's snowboard helmet that I picked up at a thrift store for a couple of bucks.  I chose it for its art deco profile and resemblance to the "Spaceman Spiff" style helmets in my imagination.

The vented sides are one of my favorite elements.  Combined with the aerodynamic lines, it really sells the space-opera effect I was going for.  The knurled brass knob seen below is a bit of added bling that I picked up at the hardware store.  It secures the lining and chin strap into the helmet.

I'm a huge fan of subtle design elements.


I've handled a number of reproduction and real helmets both real and decorative and even once got my hands on a Victorian-era brass fire helmet.  All of the ones I liked most had embossed patterns worked into them, usually in an Italianate viniform motif.  The Victorians loved this kind of decoration, and almost everything was decorated.  In metalwork, however, they tended toward playing with light and shadow rather than gilding and paint like the suit of armor at the end of that second link.


To accomplish this effect, I painted swirling designs in thick acrylic paint between the first and second coat of metallic copper spraypaint.  Then when I went over the whole helmet with washes of FW Burnt Umber acrylic drawing ink that I then ragged off, the ink remained in recessed areas and the raised areas remained bright, giving the illusion of greater depth than is actually here.

After the inkwash dried, I worked several thin washes of forest green into the creases to accentuate them even more and imply the sort of verdigris that builds up over time on real copper.  This also had the effect of dulling the fake metal-flake effect given by the spray paints even further until the whole thing was virtually indistiguishable from the real copper wastebasket in my bathroom.

With all of the styrofoam yanked out, it fit my head much more closely than a ski helmet, which is one of the reasons it doesn't scan immediately as a repainted plastic ski helmet.  I sewed-up a quilted cap liner out of linen to replace it.  Naturally, this invalidates it as a crash helmet, but it fits more like a classic helmet this way and since it's only for costume use, I figured what the heck, why not?  And Styrofoam's not very Buck Rogers anyway...

Three Recent Steampunk Costumes

Capt. Arbuckle "Buck" Rogers, Aeronaut
Translating classic sci fi into the steampunk milieu is a time-honored tradition.  The happy meeting between my love of steampunk and my love of fifties sci fi.  So when an chance to go to Seattle's Steamcon II rolled around, I brought out a steampunk iteration of everyone's favorite time-displaced individual, Captain Buck Rogers.

Throckmorton Q. Calabash, Aeroship Gambler
I grew up in Missouri, land of river boats and Mark Twain.  I envision a steampunk milieu of 19th century St Louis, port for paddlewheeler airships and haven of riverboat gamblers and hair-brained inventors of Throckmorton's sort.

James Quartermaine, "Gentleman Adventurer" (read: Feckless Ne'erdowell)
A man of means fallen on hard times and gone on the lam, James Quartermaine is a persona I've adopted off and on for years.  Of James, little is known and less is understood, but his gadgetry is as ingenious as those he stole if from and often used to relieve lonely matrons of their jewels.