Dystopia Rising Armor pt2

This is the second blog about the armor. here I will be distressing all my pieces.

 The first three images are an all around vies of the top pieces of my armor togeather. the belt has three plastic side pieces with my symbol on them. I simply glued foamies to a piece of polystyrene, cut my design, and tacked them to a heavy fabric. Then I added the eyelets in the front to tie the belt shut and keep things in place.

 The arm plates were kids sheilds I found at goodwill for 99 cents for the both of them, then I added some rabbit furs I had laying around from other projects. Underneath is a strap to keep the pieces snug to my arms and to give me more coverage without losing range or stabbing people with airplane shoulder pads.

 The plastic side plates were spray painted silver first to simulate metal then green as a cover up because my games area is very forested. The flowery symbol is supposed to symbolize my in game clan, so I used duct tape to make a sticky stencil then spray over that stencil. Once it's peeled off it reveals the metal below and my symbol.

 Here'zs where the distressing begins. In a dystopian era fabrics get harder to find. My shiny fake leather was well too new looking. I ended up taking a serated knife and just scraping at the fabric here. It gives it that banged up, scuffed and scratched look. Really the only advice I have here is have fun. Scrap in patches, cuts, scratch marks both deep and shallow. Don't feel back if you cut too deep it just means someone got a good shot in at one point.

 More distressing of the shoulder pads. Since she actually scavenged thees in character too I let the orginal color shine through. For giggles I made sure that red was right and green was left cuz my grandpa alwasy used to say red right return when returning from fishing. It means keep the red markers on your right, or you might hit another boat on the way in.

 Since these are down low I figured lots of things scratched these but not necessarily cut them so I just sort of dru the knif across in rather than scraping with the knife.

 Here was where the real mess began which is why I'm in the garage now. After I'd done a good bit of scraping and scuffing I added powders and paints to signify dirt. I had various colored powders that I took a small brush and just dusted onto the top and sides. Giving it that dirty, messing feel.

 Here's a view from the front.

 The other side where you can finally see my ammo pouch. (I can't believe I didn't get a good pic before this.) That pouch holds my ammo glove as well as my pouches because our game requires either nerf darts in the day time or packets of bird seed at night. This holds all of it. It has little nerf dart clips added to the side, but they face down when the bottom of the bag folds in. I might need to adde card board to the bag to hold it open.

Here's the back. The picture is fuzzy though, but I ended up going a bit crazy here. I was using everything that looked like dirt of mud or grass stains that i had. I had green spray paints, bottles of green acrylic, powders, dusts, everything and I just sort of threw it at the outfit. At some point I started smudging the paint to get that rubbed in look as well. A lot of the time i was using paint brushes to get the spots and flecks, but a lot of crafting is not fearing getting dirty. Seriously, keep a pair of crafting clothes at hand that you don't mind getting dirty. 

At this stage I sprayed the whole thing down with clear acrylic because it locks all that work into place. Once it dries over the night I'll go out and do more. For something like this it's a lot of how you feel about it. I do want to add some blood smears, and deeper gashes to it, but that might be for another post. I need to see how this one wears first, and fix any little issues that come up. Thus, I am off to kill zombies!

Feel free to ask questions, leave comments, etc. I"m always up for a chat!