Some time ago I posted the dress for the Lady Loki cosplay. This weekend I made the diadem.

After I tried mould powder and resin for Artemisia’s armour, Loki’s headdress was a good opportunity to try another new material. In theater and cosplay thermoplastic materials are used for example for armour, crowns or jewellry. Basically everything that otherwise would have to be made from metal or leather by an artisan. Mostly the material is called Worble. Worbla is the name of one brand. I tried Worbla and Kobracast. The first you get in plates made from thermoplastic material and the latter additionally has a polyester net fabric on one side.

Both you can heat up (with a hairdryer or by dropping it into hot water) and then mold. You can do this with bare hands since the material cools down very fast, but stays soft for a while. Additionally the material is sticky and it can even be fused with itself.

Tutorial

For Loki’s diadem is used this tutorial: Lady Loki’s Diadem by Jojoska

Since the material and three-dimensional modelling is new for me I had to do everything several times and of course there is still room for improvement. 😉

The horns have a styrofoam core and are wrapped with Kobracast. Since you can see the fabric structure you have to fill in the holes. For that I used the mould powder again. Then I put on a varnish so the mould powder wouldn’t soak up all of the colour again. Then I primed the horns and spray painted them gold.

The diadem is made from Worbla. Worbla is more solid than Kobracast so I didn’t need a core. For the relief that goes across the whole diadem I cut a styrofoam master anyway and melted the Worbla on top of it. The smaller ornaments in the middle I moulded by hand. Those I made several times and so they are basically the best pieces. Worbla isn’t as rough as Kobracast, but you still have to fill in an sand off the bumps. But for this I just used a viscous varnish. After that I also primed the diadem and spray painted it gold.

For the fastening I tried several methods. This is why I had to mend the diadem and horns then an again. 😉 I opted for the most simple method in the end. The horns should be removeable for transport. So I drilled two holes crossing each other into the base of the horns, threaded corset lace through and masked the holes with Worbla again. For the lace there a corresponding holes in the diadem. And on the diadem itself I secured fabric strips with a piece of Worbla.

The inside of the diadem is padded with wool felt. So the plastic isn’t directly on the skin and since otherwise it would be rather umcomfortable.

Additionally there are small medallions as hair decoration. These I made from mould powder again, made a silicon mold and copied them with resin.

Conclusion

For the first try I’m rather satisfied. Of course there’s a lot of room for improvement. For example next time I would make the horns from Worbla as well. Simply since you don’t have to rework so much. Additionally I would make all reliefs from two layers with the top layer being cut out a bit bigger. So the bottom layer holds the two-dimensional and the top layer got enough material for the three-dimensional relief. I made the small details in the middle of the diadem this way. I didn’t do it for the big relief and with all the reheating it collapsed quite a bit. And instead of the mould powder I would try primer for acryl painting. It fills in holes but is still fluid to give a smooth finish.

Worbla is a very interesting material. It is extremely flexible, you basically can’t break it. And you can reheat and remold it anytime. I still have to warm up to Kobracast. It is a bit capricious and needs much reworking. With all the spray painting I found my favourite new spray cans. The Molotow Artist line. The price I a third of the ones in the hardware store, they are spraying much better, the last longer, they cover faster and they even are more robust. And they have about a million shades. The only downside is that they only have three effect colours (gold, chrome, copper) and they are very shiny. But this is mostly taste. I just like the dull antique gold shade.

Oh and sorry for the horrible mobile phone pictures. I prematurely loaned my good camera to my dad. 😉