Nyra- WIP Wings

Hello~ My cosplay blog will very quickly become a uni project blog. I’m designing a dragon inspired suit of armour, with almost 2 metre high wings.

Since I’m tiny, and have a bad back, my tutors and I worked together to find the lightest, and securest way to support the wings on my back. We dug around in my garage, and we found an old diving tank harness.

We stripped it of it’s harness, and attached some backpack straps ( since they would be might nicer on my shoulders )

bolted down nicely~

To make the membrane of the wings, I’ll be using liquid latex. I dunno about you guys, but latex is friggen expensivethese days, sheesh! We got a discount since we ordered quite a lot, yay~

And if you haven’t smelt liquid latex before- be thankful! It’s VERY powerful stuff hahah. You should wear a mask when working with large amounts :)

So we made a baby mock up of the wings. Just to be sure they would work at a large scale. Cus I want moving wings. No point in making wings if they’re not gonna move.

And it’s drying on plastic, cus you can rip it off easily- it sticks to everything else.

And don’t be shy with latex when it’s dry! It’s very durable, and you can pull and stretch it however you wish. I gave my baby wings about three coats.

and flop

p.s when you remove dried latex, rub baby power all over it. Otherwise the latex will stick together and you’ve ruined all your hard work.

Below, I worked with red and blue cotton, to see if I could give the wings a vein like texture. I also tried other methods of giving it texture…

I settled on a shellac method. Shellac is AWESOME, I’ve been using it since high school :) anyhows, when it’s dry, I just crushed it in my fist, and it created all these cracks on it’s surface- Like leathery dragon wings >D

I also wasn’t happy with the shape of my baby wings. It stared at them for about ten minutes, drew them on my character to see what the problem was and- realised they looked like butterfly wings.

The sketch below is how I altered the shape to my liking. Much more dragonish!

Onwards to the big scale wings!

With a lot of help, I weld all the joints together. How it works. .  is that there are three unmoving joints right at the bottom. This is for more stability and to be more visually pleasing. Then there are four joints that all move. The latex will bond them all together, so when I move the very top joint, they’ll all whoosh up.

We laid them out on huge sheets of plastic, masking taped the shapes

and I spent today latexing them! They’ll have four layers in total :)