The Makings of a Cardassian Officer

So, I've FINALLY started on my Cardassian officer's uniform for the Star Trek convention in Las Vegas! I was originally going to try my hand at sculpting the armour and then casting it in rubber, but in all honesty...that's scary! I know, I know, I just need to get over it. But, I just feel more comfortable working with materials that I'm familiar with.

So, anyway, I started yesterday by patterning out my armour. Step 1 was to make a basic body block. Since the armour doesn't have much definition at bust, I used the instructions on The Renaissance Tailor to create my base pattern. This gave me a good jumping off point. All I had on hand was computer paper and brown packing tape, so that's what I used to make my pattern.

Once I had my basic pattern drafted, I pinned it to my dress mannequin and started drawing out the contour lines on the original armor. It took a bit of sketching, and allot of tweaking, but I finally got a pattern I was satisfied with.
I'm making the armour out of 2mm fun foam, and actually started cutting out pieces yesterday. Unfortunately, I ran out of foam after getting half the pattern cut out, so I had to put the rest off. I now have two giant rolls of foam in my possession, and am ready to make some armour! I'm doubling all the layers to make it a bit more sturdy, and then I'm going to, hopefully, make it more rigid with some epoxy resin I picked up at the Home Depot. I also found this stuff called Plasti-Dip, which is a liquid rubber that's used to make the rubber grips on pliers and things. I figured that I could use it to coat the finished armour and give it the rubber look of the original uniforms on screen. We'll see how it works out, and I'll report back. But for now, there are more pieces to cut out!