Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Teen Titans - Beast Boy's Gloves, Boots, and Animal Accessories

My original Beast Boy design looked like this:


I wanted to stick with his color scheme from the Teen Titans cartoon, while bringing in more details (y'know, the usual). I wanted to keep a realistic look to the outfit, especially with what I had done with Robin's jacket, so I choose to paint his boots and gloves rather than making them from scratch.

For the boots, I used an ancient pair of motor boots I had lying around. Honestly I had meant to throw these out years ago, and had put them by the back door and forgotten about them. It's not hoarding if you eventually use it!

Old and gross

The first step was cleaning the boots: first with soap and water, then with rubbing alcohol on all the areas I was going to paint. I re-polished the black areas with black shoe polish to make them look nice and shiny. (Oh, plus gluing the soles back together since they were literally falling apart).
I used a cotton ball to paint the tongues with silver acrylic, so I could do a light coat but avoid brushstrokes.


Cover areas you don't want paint on!

I used a brush to apply purple leather paint (Leather Studio from Joann's) to all the areas I wanted purple.


It took a couple of coats...

(L) Two coats, (R) Just one

Being Harley Davidson boots, they had the Harley logo on them. I used hot glue to fill in all the crevices of the logo, then painted over with Doom Patrol! (I also repeated this logo on his Doom Patrol side bag, for carrying swag around the con).


Lastly, I painted the soles with the silver acrylic:

Like new, only better!

 I approached the gloves the exact same way, with the same paints. Unfortunately, I did not have any old black gloves lying around, so I bought new motorcycle gloves. I tried to get a pair with lots of "sections" to paint, and nice big cuffs.

Thanks Amazon!

One coat of purple

Additional coats of purple. Trying to decide on how to do the wrist strap.

Filled in the wrist strap with silver. All done!

I had grand plans for a moving tentacle arm, but of course these fell through due to time constraints and the fact that I had no idea how to even start with that kind of prop. I settled on a fuzzy animal hand/glove instead, because it was more sewing, less prop-y.

I started with intensely green fun fur. If I had known then how much fun fur I would inhale over the course of the project, I may never have started....


I traced a hand shape out....


... and sewed it into a glove. Yes, it was at that point I realized I didn't need to paint two leather gloves.

The dreaded muppet hand

This was way, WAY too fluffy. I trimmed it a bunch, highlighted it with lime green screen printing ink, and hit it hard with hairspray to avoid inhaling any more fuzz.


On the palm, I used hot glue to hold the fibers down and create a skin texture, similar to a gorilla palm (???). I painted this to match the skin color I was planning on using for BB's make-up.


Last bit was the nails. I bought a set of those plastic "witch fingers" and was planning on removing the nails and attaching to my glove. Unfortunately, I made the glove fingers too short, so I ended up using the entire finger tip to create more space. First I painted the fingers....

Paint does not stick to rubber very well, FYI.

Highlights and shading are important!

...and attached the fingers to the gloves with hot glue (which means the fingers are now falling off, so gotta fix that...)


The last piece was the ears, which were red devil ears that I painted to match everything else. Again, rubber does not take paint very well, so they'll definitely need touch ups later.

Painting

All done!

No comments:

Post a Comment