After a long time lurking, I finally decided to take the plunge into EVA Foam building of a SM costume. After seeing the fantastic builds here and the YT videos of folks like Pilerud's and Gary Sterley's builds, I knew I needed to do it. I've never done a Cosplay before, so that is another journey to head down! So why not just a standard SM? I feel like there are so few Termi builds out there, that I wanted to add another to the ranks of the Terminators before doing an SM build.
The next decision is what chapter to chose... I'm a diehard Space Wolves fan. I played them back in 3rd Edition in the table top and I love their lore. I also love the Wolf Guard lore. The largest reason NOT to chose the SW's was because of their propensity to NOT wear helmets. Given that I am shooting for roughly 7' to 7' 6" tall Termi and there is no way I could grow the facial hair or my actual hair out far enough to do a helmetless SW, it was just easier to pick a standard SM chapter instead. The question then went to "To Deathwatch or Not to Deathwatch"... that is, indeed, the question. For now, I'm thinking not, since it'll be easier to weather just about any other color of power armor!
Why the Excoriators? This is a bit more complex... the history of the chapter is great. They are not fully Codex Astartes compliant (bonus in my book
) yet their history and loyalty to the emperor is extremely deep. The other convenient aspect of the Excoriators is battle damage is NOT repaired unless it impairs the function of the armor. This gives me a REALLY good excuse to put significant battle damage on the armor and not feel guilty!
This will definitely tax my artistic abilities since painting has never been a strong suit... neither my miniatures, nor any other models I've painted!
Ok, so the files I'm using are listed inthe Pep Library and are credited, erroneously, to Ex1le but should be credited to Tango89er. They are fantastic files and are the same files being used by a few other Termi builds here! I'm making some tweaks to the build as I go based upon ease of creation of parts. This build is using a mix of EVA Foam interlocking tiles in 1/2" thickness and 12mm and 6mm EVA foam from TNT Cosplay Supply in Texas. The helmet and torso are all using the interlocking tiles, the rest will be with the TNT Cosplay Foam.
So where did the build begin? It began as me wanting to have a terminator helmet on my desk and what started innocently enough turned into a full blown desire to have the full suit of power armor! Well, that escalated quickly! So I DID start off making just the helmet, first out of paper using a the Pepakura files for the helmet. I wasn't overly satisfied with the paper and knew I'd spend a long time refining it before being satisfied enough to cast it in fiberglass. The logical progression was to go to Foam, so that's what I did. Once the helmet was done, the torso was next. I'm still not done with it as there are a lot of details to work out. I've also intentionally left the back vents out as I plan on doing in suit cooling. Either in the form of cooling fans or possibly a reservoir setup with a peltier cooling device to have cool fluid to run through a cool shirt. Lofty goal, but better to not install stuff that will interfere with that goal later on!
Right now I'm working on the pelvis (as the files call it), the built setup. Since it's a key part of getting the scale of the armor correct, I wanted to make it so I could finish making modifications to the torso as it was evident from other builds that the chest piece did not have enough length to it.
I'll have more photos to attach as the build progresses! If you guys have any comments or criticisms, please feel free to post! I do want to put a good amount of work into the build to make sure it is done well! If I'm going to take a full leap into Cosplaying AND into Space Marine stuff, I definitely want it to be worth the effort! Thanks in advance!
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