In September of 2021, I had been working on Théodred for several months, and had been posting about my experience casting pewter buckles on social media. One of my friends who cosplays as Thranduil (Artemistyck) reached out to see if I’d be interested in making some replica buckles for their planned armored version of the character. I agreed to give it a shot.
The available reference was not extensive, but enough to go on. My digital 3D modeling chops were weak, having not done very much since college, and I wasn’t confident that I could recreate this somewhat organic shape. I drew the outline in Illustrator and printed out several versions to try to determine scale. Once we agreed on the size, I sculpted the buckle using Monster Clay directly on top of the printout.
My first attempt at molding it with Mold Max 60 was a disaster. At this point I was still using a very basic digital kitchen scale to weigh the the two parts of the silicone that need to be mixed at a 100:3 ratio, and it was not sensitive enough. I upgraded to a more precise scale and tried again, to much better results. After casting in pewter, the pieces still needed plenty of cleanup. I filed and sanded them, and added either a steel tongue made from a nail or an aluminum one made from a length of rod (I don’t remember). I 3D printed a custom box using Ultimate Box Generator in OpenSCAD and made inserts with some scrap EVA foam. At the time of writing this, I don’t believe Artemistyck has made the costume these would be a part of, but they were happy with them at the time.
