Happy new year! Hope you've all had a fantastic year, have a great year ahead and had a brilliant new year's eve, so here is something for reminiscing from a good year ago.
This is a commission of sorts I made a while back, the character it was for was a tech-priest from Mars from the Warhammer universe. This pretty much made the idea for this project for it to be as imposing and huge as possible as when you're mostly robotic weight isn't an issue.
His idea was a huge tome, something he could connect to his belt and carry around with him to look nice and menacing with a weathered look. With this info, I cracked on and as a huge fan of the Warhammer fiction, I'd got a few ideas floating around already.
I decided to go for a fairly simplistic design for the front thanks to the Adepts at the Mechanicum basically being efficient robot men/things. I used a large sprocket from a bike cassette to stand as the cog emblem of the Mechanicum and riveted it to the leather bound ring binder folder I used as a base.
I lined the inside with velvet, held in place by both the hand stitching that runs around the border, and by the rivets. I decided to go with a rich red to match the decadence that seems to be a running theme in the 'grim far future' and to match the red planet!
To make it possible for him to lace the pages up (As he was providing his own) I laced some leather thonging up the spine to make it easy to put the pages in pretty quickly.
The corners of the leather cover weren't that pleasant, so to cover them up and provide a sort of finished feel to the tome, I added some leather corner pieces to add some detail.
To make sure it could be attached to his costume, I screwed on some large chains to provide that menacing look he was going for. These attach to another loop of chain with a padlock to secure it to anything like a belt or backpack.
To secure the whole thing, I added a large hasp onto the side, secured by a large padlock. This helped put some details onto the side as well as adding a nice solid look to the whole design.
Here you can see how it attaches to a belt, not an insubstantial prop I tell you, a thick belt definitely needed, but it fits the brief of 'solid' pretty well. I think it was someone on a steampunk forum who commented on it being 'Marley's chains', fits pretty well if I'm honest!
Lovely prop to make, lots of measuring into working out the size of leather to cut but the velvet came out really nicely in the end. Unfortunately, the guy I was making it for (a friend of mine) was unable to go to the event he was planning to use it for so I've still got it at home.
It's held up pretty well, only problem is that the paint has come off on the chains and scraped on the leather a bit, I'll get round to sealing the chain after a respray and get the paint off with some acetone or paint remover at some point in the future.
Until next time, cheers for reading.
This is a commission of sorts I made a while back, the character it was for was a tech-priest from Mars from the Warhammer universe. This pretty much made the idea for this project for it to be as imposing and huge as possible as when you're mostly robotic weight isn't an issue.
His idea was a huge tome, something he could connect to his belt and carry around with him to look nice and menacing with a weathered look. With this info, I cracked on and as a huge fan of the Warhammer fiction, I'd got a few ideas floating around already.
I decided to go for a fairly simplistic design for the front thanks to the Adepts at the Mechanicum basically being efficient robot men/things. I used a large sprocket from a bike cassette to stand as the cog emblem of the Mechanicum and riveted it to the leather bound ring binder folder I used as a base.
I lined the inside with velvet, held in place by both the hand stitching that runs around the border, and by the rivets. I decided to go with a rich red to match the decadence that seems to be a running theme in the 'grim far future' and to match the red planet!
To make it possible for him to lace the pages up (As he was providing his own) I laced some leather thonging up the spine to make it easy to put the pages in pretty quickly.
The corners of the leather cover weren't that pleasant, so to cover them up and provide a sort of finished feel to the tome, I added some leather corner pieces to add some detail.
To make sure it could be attached to his costume, I screwed on some large chains to provide that menacing look he was going for. These attach to another loop of chain with a padlock to secure it to anything like a belt or backpack.
To secure the whole thing, I added a large hasp onto the side, secured by a large padlock. This helped put some details onto the side as well as adding a nice solid look to the whole design.
Here you can see how it attaches to a belt, not an insubstantial prop I tell you, a thick belt definitely needed, but it fits the brief of 'solid' pretty well. I think it was someone on a steampunk forum who commented on it being 'Marley's chains', fits pretty well if I'm honest!
Lovely prop to make, lots of measuring into working out the size of leather to cut but the velvet came out really nicely in the end. Unfortunately, the guy I was making it for (a friend of mine) was unable to go to the event he was planning to use it for so I've still got it at home.
It's held up pretty well, only problem is that the paint has come off on the chains and scraped on the leather a bit, I'll get round to sealing the chain after a respray and get the paint off with some acetone or paint remover at some point in the future.
Until next time, cheers for reading.
